Brooklyn Museum Exhibit Censures Censorship : Art: The display is made up of deliberately ‘objectionable’ works partly funded by the NEA that were already part of the museum’s collection.

While a Cincinnati art gallery and its director stand trial for obscenity, the Brooklyn Museum is showing deliberately “objectionable” artworks funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Museum officials culled the display of nude children, embracing lesbians and homoerotic paintings from their own collection, in response to what they call the current climate of censorship.

The exhibit, “The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable,” also includes three Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, including a study of a nude black man. Museum officials said 20% of the funding came from the NEA and the rest from donations.

“The really mind-bending discovery is that museums and private collections throughout the land are already replete of art which would send certain politicians and certain public pronouncers crazy,” said Robert Buck, the museum’s director. “It’s already been this way for thousands of years. Art is a reflection of life.”

NEA spokeswoman Virginia Falck said Tuesday that the endowment was not aware of the nature of the exhibit and was “looking into it.” The endowment has come under attack from conservatives for using government money to fund art projects they believe are obscene.

Joseph Kosuth, considered one of the leaders in the conceptual art movement that began in the 1960s, received an NEA grant last spring for an unspecified exhibition, giving just the briefest details of the kind of art that would be displayed. He decided to comb the Brooklyn Museum for art that would illustrate what he believes is the fallacy of artistic censorship.

Kosuth said he asked the curators of the museum’s six major departments to come up with artwork that could be considered objectionable by some.

“It really shows the history of the culture of intolerance,” Kosuth said. “We’re only organizing what’s already there. We’re showing that this is endemic to the whole cultural context and that a country shouldn’t assault itself this way with this kind of debate.”

The exhibit includes a broad range of paintings, photographs and sculpture. Among the artwork displayed are Rodin’s bronzes of lesbians embracing, 19th-Century paintings of nude children and an 18th-Century Hindu painting of a man urinating into another man’s mouth called “Intoxicated Ascetics.”

One of the seven photographs at issue in the obscenity trial of a Cincinnati art gallery and its director shows a man urinating into another man’s mouth.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibit also includes a series by the contemporary photographer Larry Clark whose series “Teen-age Lust” shows explicit photographs of sex acts, as well as a photo of a nude brother and sister. The boy is pointing a pistol at his sister, who is tied up.

“Mapplethorpe would be considered mild compared with some of the work,’ Kosuth said.

The exhibit, which runs until Dec. 4, is on display in the grand lobby.

“It hits you right when you walk in,” Kosuth said. “But there are signs up letting people know if they don’t want to see it or if they don’t want their children to see it.”

Juxtaposed between the artwork are quotations by historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and George Bernard Shaw.

The quote from Hitler reads: “Artist does not create for the artist; he creates for the people and we will see to it henceforth that people will be called in to judge its art.” Shaw’s quote reads, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”