Keeping Cincinnati Clean

By Richard Lacayo

The most famous definition of pornography is still the eyeball test once offered by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: "I know it when I see it." A grand jury in Hamilton County, Ohio, figured they knew what they were seeing in Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center last April. Citing pictures that were part of a retrospective of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's work, they brought criminal charges against the museum and its director, Dennis Barrie, for pandering obscenity.

Barrie's trial, which began last week, is shaping up as a landmark: the first time an American museum director has faced criminal charges because of work that he chose to display. The case has unnerved museum directors, who have long assumed that their right to show whatever artworks they selected is covered by First Amendment guarantees of free expression. With a battle over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts expected to begin in Congress this week -- a fight that was set off by Mapplethorpe's pictures -- the art world is feeling besieged. "The police coming in our door has opened the door of all museums," says Barrie.

Cincinnati has made a name for itself as a porn-busting town: Censornati. There is not a single X-rated theater, topless bar or massage parlor inside the city limits. That is small comfort to museum directors elsewhere, who fear they could be next. Some plan to testify as expert witnesses, hoping to persuade the jury that pictures may resemble porn but also affect the viewer in the more complex manner of art. "These photographs are not meant to titillate," says Arnold Lehman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. "They don't have that vacuous anonymity that pornography is so much about."

The seven photographs in question do have some of pornography's rawness and occasional power to shock. In one picture a man urinates into another man's mouth. In another a man's fist and forearm is seen inserted into a man's rectum. Two images -- a nude boy on a chair and a little girl whose dress is raised in a way that exposes her genitals -- led to charges of illegal use of a minor, though the mothers of the children gave Mapplethorpe permission to take the photographs and the center to display them. "Where would you draw the line?" asks Monty Lobb, president of Citizens for Community Values, a local group that first drew the show to the sheriff's attention. "Will next year's photographs depict bestiality or necrophilia?"

The current Supreme Court definition of obscenity requires that a "reasonable person," applying "contemporary community standards," would find that the work appeals to the prurient interest, depicts patently offensive sexual behavior and lacks serious artistic value. Last month Judge F. David Albanese, a former assistant county prosecutor, made the defense job more difficult by ruling that the jury need only see the seven pictures at issue. Defense attorneys had argued that the Supreme Court requirement to consider the work "as a whole" meant that the jury should see all of the pictures from the Mapplethorpe show, most of them floral still lifes, portraits and male nudes.

Prosecutors may well get a jury to agree that some of the pictures by % Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS last year, could offend people in Sodom, much less Cincinnati. The more complex question is whether such pictures can move people in other ways. The future of American art may depend on how the jury answers that one.

With reporting by Barbara Dolan/Cincinnati