NEWS ANALYSIS : Debate Over Art and Free Speech Isn’t Finished : Arts: A museum director may have been found not guilty of obscenity, but the NEA and 2 Live Crew are still under fire.

Far from settling anything, the acquittal of a Cincinnati art museum and its director on obscenity charges Friday is only the latest in a series of mixed signals in a national debate over freedom of speech and artistic expression.

In Congress this week and in courtrooms in Florida and New York--likely over the next month--this debate may intensify. It will not end, but it may establish whether American society has entered a lasting period of questioning, even proscribing, First Amendment rights.

In Cincinnati, a jury exonerated the Contemporary Arts Center director, Dennis Barrie, of obscenity and child pornography charges. The misdemeanor counts grew out of a show of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe that had been at the center of the National Endowment for the Arts’ political crisis.

That imbroglio began last year with controversy over an NEA-supported photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. It gained momentum that summer over the Mapplethorpe photographs and has swept a series of First Amendment issues in front of it as it has avalanched down the face of public debate ever since.

Harvard Law School professor and constitutional expert Kathleen Sullivan said she was a little surprised by the Cincinnati verdict. Like many observers, Sullivan said that the acquittal may only have turned up the heat in Washington.

Most immediately, Sullivan said the decision affirmed the viability of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Miller vs. California. That case reaffirmed the doctrine that local community standards control obscenity prosecutions, though certain broad, federal principles remain.

Among those guidelines is a requirement that work with “serious artistic merit” generally cannot be prosecuted as pornography. “Miller was never supposed to come out of the porn shop and into the art museum,” Sullivan said. “That’s what the serious artistic merit test was always meant to do.”

But if Cincinnati were a celebration of the resiliency of Miller, only days before a Florida jury convicted a record store owner in an obscenity case for selling a 2 Live Crew rap album. 2 Live Crew goes on trial separately this week on related charges.

Meanwhile in New York, a federal judge’s decision is expected soon in a lawsuit against the NEA that seeks resolution of the constitutionality of anti-obscenity language inserted in a 1990 NEA funding bill. More significantly, however, the judge is expected to rule on a requirement imposed by the NEA that grant recipients certify in writing that they will not create “obscene” work.

A decision in favor of the NEA--whose chairman, John E. Frohnmayer, has made it clear he is prepared to sacrifice some NEA-supported artists in the interests of peace with the political right--would, some lawyers have argued, enfranchise a new era of loyalty oaths.

Just last week, Frohnmayer successfully defended the NEA on the narrow issue of whether its money had technically been used to support a puppet show in which genital-less puppets engaged in simulated oral sex. Lost in that exchange was a sentence in a letter from Frohnmayer to television evangelist Pat Robertson, who initiated the controversy.

The Atlanta puppeteer, Jon Ludwig, is an internationally acclaimed artist whose adult and children’s shows have prompted broad critical praise. The controversial show had been no different. Reviews and audience reaction had been uniformly favorable, but Frohnmayer wrote to Robertson on Sept. 30, that “if the show is as you describe it, it would never be supported” by the NEA.

In Washington, as early as Tuesday, Congress may begin a long-delayed debate on whether, or how, to limit the artistic freedom of arts institutions and artists supported by the NEA. The outcome: beyond prediction.

The congressional drama is to be played in an atmosphere of near-total confusion, with arts advocates still wrangling over whether proposed political compromises designed to save the endowment may gut it, instead. Those agreements leave decisions about whether NEA-funded work is obscene up to state courts.

Complicating the situation, congressional preoccupation with the budget crisis may prevent the arts debate from ever occurring. Worse, perhaps, the debate might be initiated in the House but be aborted in the Senate.

If that happens, NEA and the cultural issues it symbolizes will be left vulnerable to any passing political arts-freedom virus. Robertson’s group, the Christian Coalition, has already begun a coup de grace campaign to play the Atlanta puppet show episode into a deciding factor.

Similarly, the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Assn. gave broad hints that it intends to try to use the Cincinnati verdict as a weapon against the NEA. If Mapplethorpe’s images of men engaged in sex aren’t obscene in Cincinnati, Wildmon’s organization will ask, can American morals be safeguarded anywhere under existing NEA and local obscenity laws?

Wildmon’s lawyer, Benjamin Bull, said the verdict “proves how utterly ridiculous” the fragile, Miller case-dependent NEA compromise is. “We could continue (NEA) funding of photographs of people with riding crops sticking out of their anuses,” he said, alluding to one Mapplethorpe image. “Give me 10 juries in obscenity cases and you’ll get verdicts going in any direction,” Bull said.

“Cincinnati has a reputation for being a clean city, but the defense pulled out all the stops to win. Local standards change from community to community. Rather than looking at the verdict, let’s look at the art. The NEA could fund Mapplethorpe again.”

It was this reasoning--which might prove enticing in Congress when the climate is already super-heated by the budget debate--that made many observers of Cincinnati cautious in their assessments.

The Cincinnati prosecution “was a lousy case that never should have been brought,” said New York First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who brought the pending New York loyalty oath case on behalf of the Manhattan-based New School for Social Research.

“I think this is better viewed as the avoidance of disaster than as a total triumph for freedom of expression. Freedom was safer the day before the indictment than it is now. But the very fact that the indictment was brought and the trial was held has certainly been a blow.”