Upstaged by Its Own Notoriety : The Mapplethorpe photo exhibit that touched off such controversy last year arrives in Berkeley--but who can look at it objectively?

Is this the show that launched a thousand quips? Is this the art that caused Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to say its maker was no artist and his work was junk? Is this the cause of congressional consternation over the National Endowment for the Arts, the grounds to legislate against throwing taxpayers’ dollars away to subsidize such junk?

Can this possibly be the same exhibition that brought dismay and disgrace to the venerable Corcoran Gallery when it chickened out of presenting it in the nation’s capital? Aesthetes were furious. Artists canceled exhibitions. The Corcoran’s beleaguered director Christina Orr-Cahal was eventually forced to resign.

Yup. This is the show all right. “The Perfect Moment,” photographs and other works by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, is now on view at the University Art Museum, UC Berkeley, until March 18. It’s hard to imagine it igniting any further fuss in puritanically liberal Berkeley, but you never know.

It’s not a particularly large show for a retrospective and certainly not in proportion to its notoriety. But it is a primo example of what happens to art when it becomes the focus of controversy. Its opponents damn so fervently that it starts to sound titillating. Mapplethorpe’s enemies paint him as a scuzzy pornographer, a Marquis de Sade delighting in pain and torture.

Gee, if it’s that naughty, it might be a kick.

Forgetting the time-honored principle of le succes de scandale , polarized supporters over-praise their hero’s virtues. Mapplethorpe’s admirers hymn him as a perfectionist who captured each subject at an instant of classic glamour, be it in a sculptural torso or the exquisite edge of a calla lily. Wow, this guy sounds like the greatest artist since Michelangelo met Aubrey Beardsley--and a martyr to the Philistines to boot. Better check it out.

The wearily predictable result is an exhibition that everybody looks at but nobody sees.

How can anybody possibly concentrate on wafting nuances of artistic expression when the art has been so badly used that the only pertinent question seems to be: Why all the fuss?

Clearly, if this culture was even fractionally as tolerant as it ought to be, none of this would have happened.

Mapplethorpe was a homosexual who died of AIDS last year at age 42. He made the ramifications of his sexuality into a principal theme of his art. In one triple self-portrait he shows himself first as a hard-case street-corner hooker in leather, then as a winsome androgyne and finally as a ‘40s style glamour girl. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. In a late example, he looks ravaged with illness and holds a skull-headed cane.

Writing in the New Yorker, critic Ingrid Sischy said that the real importance of this work is not in its aesthetic merit but in the liberating frankness of its homosexuality--letting it also be known that she herself is gay. The observation was a significant reflection of a widespread current phenomenon in which art is used as a kind of cultural agit-prop promoting the attitudes of various special interest groups.

In that context Mapplethorpe’s work might be seen as having achieved something. But in an imagined world where every artist is out to promote a cause we are still faced with the questions: Which artists are we going to prefer and why are we going to prefer them? One obvious answer in a climate of social advocacy is that we are going to prefer the artist whose political and psychological point of view is closest to our own.

Forgetting the suffocating egoism of such an aesthetic for the moment, let’s ask if Mapplethorpe is an ideal representative of the gay point of view. The exhibition displays a portfolio of small prints that includes images of homosexual sadomasochism so extreme they cannot be reprinted or described in this newspaper.

Some gay people might think this sort of thing gives them a bad name.

As a social propagandist, Mapplethorpe’s appeal is certainly too specialized to attract more more than a small cult following unless something else about his art speaks to larger human issues through empathy and excellence.

The catalogue essays for “The Perfect Moment” leave the impression that Mapplethorpe was a fastidiously tasteful, classically refined, fashionably glamorous, formally astute artist who directed his subjects’ fare-thee-well, choosing hair styles, cosmetics, pose and lighting with the care of a diamond cutter. The actual exhibition so regularly contradicts this image that one suspects the writers of having got too enamored of their own theme of perfection.

On the upside there are images here far more humane than the artist’s chilly reputation. A perfectly endearing portrait of his friend Sam Wagstaff shows him bright, kindly and amused. A brooding William Burroughs has the hard-bought wisdom and dignity of a man who survived the woozy purgatory of decades of drugs and turned the experience into important literature. An image of Katherine Cebrian has the regal maturity of Edith Sitwell.

On the downside it seems Mapplethorpe’s reputation for glamour is largely undeserved. He could get it when it was there, but a couple of female sitters look more like arriviste bimbos than ladies of fashion. When he poses the body-builder Lisa Lyon nude with a huge snake it manages only the kitsch exoticism of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. He did not photograph like a man of taste, cultivation and refinement. He photographed a street urchin’s fantasy of it. Anybody interested in the elegant decadence of the Vienna Secession gets a vulgar McDonald’s version of it here. Mapplethorpe was better at getting close to fin de siecle lurking madness that shows up regularly in Lyon’s eyes and in those of his friend Patti Smith.

Mapplethorpe greatly admired Andy Warhol, sharing his auteur leanings to film and commercial work. He also apparently shared his tainted celebrity-worshiping naivete, but lacked his wit. There are flashes of it in the Magritte-like “Man in a Three Piece Suit” with its huge male member hanging like some silly elephant-trunk nightmare of exposure. There is mordant insight in a shot of a garden with a tiny Catholic cardinal in red sitting next to a fop in a lavender satin smoking jacket, but on the whole the artist was too rigid and obsessive to be funny or truly stylish.

His reputation as a master of formal beauty is also fictionalized by the evidence. A diptych of a flower achieves its variety with a long shot and a close-up. A diptych of Smith shows inventiveness by having her stand up and then sit down. Warhol proved that playing dumb could be telling, but Mapplethorpe wasn’t quite sharp enough to see the virtue of real dumbness.

His “sculptural” photographs--often symbolically loaded black male torsos--work only occasionally, as in a shot of a ropey muscled arm. Usually such shots are impressive simply because the chosen model had a formidable body. Mapplethorpe relied enormously on subject matter; his own gifts--while real--were hampered by very limited expressive range and inventiveness.

If there is any larger human lesson to be gleaned from Mapplethorpe’s sensibility, it may have to do with religion. The artist was a lapsed Catholic, a fact that would not be worth mentioning if that influence did not show up in his art. The earliest work on view is an enigmatic assemblage called “The Rack.” An image of a haloed female saint--perhaps the virgin--stands holding her outer garment open, her hands pierced by real needles suspending a crucifix. The sides of the box are draped with two black cravats. One senses this religious theme continuing in later works, like a pair of heart-shaped reliquary boxes containing stilettos. There is ample suggestion, as in Warhol’s work, that a curdled religious impulse lies somewhere behind even his most outrageous sadomasochistic visions.

The question of what happens in a culture when the religious impulse goes wrong lurks in the air these days. It turned up recently in a film by the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Called “Dark Habits,” having to do with a group of nuns that have gone off the rails, becoming junkies, harboring murderers and generally leading cheerfully anarchistic lives.

This film and Mapplethorpe’s art really raise questions about how far humankind can go in throwing off the shackles of ancient taboos--represented first by religion and then by the constraints of society--before the whole tortilla crumbles. They are shouting “Freedom” in Eastern Europe these days. We all applaud and quietly worry about how far this can go before there is trouble.

Dark romantics like Mapplethorpe or Jim Morrison seek freedom unto death and leave the rest of us wondering how much of it we really need, how much of it, really, we can stand.