It's art. (Cincinnati obscenity case)

Economist (US), The, October, 1990

A FEW seconds before the verdict the defendant, Dennis Barrie, shifted nervously in his chair, as if to prepare himself for the worst. The words "not guilty" took a moment to register; then there was jubilation. The eighi-member Jury (seven of them regular churchgoers, none of them that keen on art) had taken less than two hours to decide that the director of the Contemporary Art Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, had not "pandered obscenity" or used minors in pornography by displaying certain sexually explicit works of the late Robert Mapplethorpe.

An art museum had never before faced criminal obscenity charges because of the content of an exhibition; but this was Mapplethorpe, whose sensuous photographs of flowers, figures and sado-masochistic goings-on have been...