A Verdict Against the Culture Cops

Eight ordinary citizens of Cincinnati have used the keen edge of common sense to cut through the Gordian knot of our fitful and convoluted national debate over art and obscenity. By acquitting their city’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director of charges they violated obscenity laws by exhibiting photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, they have sent a clear signal that there are decisions a free people have no wish to delegate to the hovering officers of a protective state.

One of those decisions is what does--and does not--constitute art.

The intensity of the Cincinnati signal is sure to be amplified by the fact that no other major city in America has taken so unyielding a stand against commercial pornography. You cannot rent an X-rated videotape in Cincinnati or see a so-called adult magazine displayed at your local newsstand. However, you can--if you so choose--go into an art museum and see whatever you deem worth the time and effort. That distinction--with all its high seriousness--was drawn by four men and four women, none of whom had joined the 30,000 other Cincinnatians who saw the Mapplethorpe exhibit.

In its waning days, the trial seemed to shape up as a sort of battle of the experts. The defense called to the stand a string of art museum professionals with unassailable academic credentials, all of whom testified to the aesthetic importance and validity of the deceased photographer’s work. Critics of their position would hold, of course, that they are precisely the sort of cultural mandarins who have sacrificed social morality to self-indulgent abstraction. On the other hand, the record number of Americans who fill our art museums and galleries each year are themselves testimony to the fact that some significant number of us are willing to share their opinions.

The prosecution’s expert witness was a “communications specialist” whose services are regularly employed by large evangelical Christian organizations. She testified that Mapplethorpe’s photographs were not art because they suffered from an “absence of human emotion.” She argued further that the pictures he took of partially clad children--with their parents’ permission--were child pornography because the youngsters’ genitalia were exposed. Defense attorneys attacked her testimony because her own artistic career consisted of a stint as a songwriter for Captain Kangaroo and 30 hours of formal art education.

It would be a profound mistake to construe the Cincinnati verdict as a choice between these experts and their values. Rather, it is an emphatic insistence on the right of every American to make distinctions for themselves according to their own taste and conscience.