Gallery Photos Compared to Child Porn : Arts: An expert witness delivers a potentially damaging blow to the Mapplethorpe defense. She tells the jury his work is not fit for a museum.

An expert witness delivered the most dramatic and potentially damaging testimony against the defense at the Mapplethorpe obscenity trial Thursday when she compared two of the photographs at issue to child pornography and said none are fit to hang in an art museum.

Judith Reisman, a mass media researcher with links to anti-pornography groups, contradicted the testimony of other arts experts who extolled the late Robert Mapplethorpe as one of the most important photographers of his time.

In contentious testimony punctuated by frequent objections, she said the seven photographs at issue have no artistic value. And the two depicting partially nude children are harmful, she said.

“By placing images of children in this day and age that are focused on the genitalia in this way . . . on the walls of our museums, what we’re doing is we are legitimizing the taking of the photos and we are legitimizing the public display of the photos and we are . . . putting at risk additional children because many people see themselves as photographers,” she said.

The Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, are on trial on charges of pandering obscenity and displaying children in “nudity-related material” in connection with a 175-piece retrospective exhibit, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment.” This is the first time an American museum or art gallery has stood trial on obscenity charges.

The exhibit, which ends a two-year national tour today in Boston, was held at the arts center last spring.

In testimony Wednesday, Barrie acknowledged that some of the acts depicted in the show were “tough, brutal, sometimes disgusting,” but he said he brought the show to Cincinnati because it was “serious and important.”

“Robert Mapplethorpe took a very tough, brutal subject and tried to bring beauty to it,” he said.

Defense attorneys tried to discredit Reisman by emphasizing her controversial published views concerning homosexuals and art and by noting that her professional background is mostly in video and music and includes a stint as a songwriter for the Captain Kangaroo television show.

She also listed among her qualifications service on former U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III’s commission on pornography and a class she taught at George Mason University this year on “sex, violence and the media.”

Under questioning by H. Louis Sirkin, the lawyer representing Barrie, Reisman declined to take credit for a quote he read to her that argued that constitutional protections should not extend to a gay lifestyle.

However, she said, “My opinion would be that anal sodomy is traumatically dysfunctional and is definitely associated with AIDS, and I could not support that constitutional protections be extended to anal sodomy.”

Mapplethorpe was a homosexual who died last year of AIDS. Five of the photographs that are being challenged in court graphically depict sadomasochistic sexual practices.

In testimony that juxtaposed graphic descriptions of the sadomasochistic practices depicted and highbrow aesthetic theory, Reisman applied her working definition of art to the images: “Based on the picture’s supposed attempt to express human emotion or human feeling, the criteria is not met,” she said of one photograph.

She based her conclusion on the fact that four of the five photographs did not include faces. The one that did, a self-portrait of Mapplethorpe involved in a graphic act, did not meet her test either because his face displayed no discernable emotion.

Reisman’s testimony was the first to directly attack the photographs as obscene and potentially harmful. Prosecutor Frank Prouty had earlier said that the photographs “speak for themselves” and that he only needed to show that the Contemporary Arts Center had publicly displayed them.

Closing arguments in the trial are scheduled today.