Censorship in Cincinnati : Art, However Vulgar, Must Not Be Policed This Way

If the wider implications of their actions were not quite so disturbing, it might be possible to muster a small stirring of sympathy for the would-be censors of Cincinnati. Their flinty little campaign to keep their city from seeing seven photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe has left the authorities there in a situation something like that of the cat Heine observed chewing its own tail: In the objective sense it was eating, but in the subjective sense it was being eaten.

Until last weekend, the 175 photographs--a few of which depict homoerotic and sadomasochistic images--probably were best known as Exhibit A in the mean-spirited, if politically potent, attack mounted against the National Endowment for the Arts by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). Then Cincinnati got into the act. A county grand jury, acting under a local ordinance hailed by anti-pornography crusaders as a national model, indicted the city’s Contemporary Arts Museum, where the exhibit is on view, and its director on two counts of pandering and using a minor in material involving nudity.

So far, all the grand jury seems to have accomplished is to give Mapplethorpe’s work qualities he could not himself provide. During his life, serious critics frequently took the artist to task for a brittle self-preoccupation and slick technique that borrowed so heavily from the world of commercial advertising that even his self-consciously provocative images seemed like a kind of consumer kink. Thus, by making such art the center of a now unavoidable battle for freedom of expression, the Cincinnati censors have managed to drape the mantle of principle over a set of shoulders that themselves seldom managed more than a shrug of cold disdain. In the process, they also have secured Mapplethorpe’s work a public it never found on its own. Openings at the Cincinnati museum usually are free and about 600 people show up. Friday, an estimated 6,000 people stood in line for hours and paid $10 apiece to get in. Thousands more streamed in over the weekend.

This shabby legal exercise is a reminder that what began as a campaign against a handful of vulgar photos has become an attempt to deprive Americans of the right to decide for themselves what kind of art they will enjoy. The events in Cincinnati represent more than tedious yahooism. They are an unacceptable blurring of the distinction between the indispensable right to live according to one’s private convictions and the insupportable insistence that others must live by them, too.