Whose Art Is It Anyway?

Whose Art Is It Anyway?:

"But if violence in the form of war is difficult to commemorate, sex is an even touchier art subject for Americans. Which is weird, since we veritably wallow in it elsewhere. Every other province of our culture--especially fashion, movies, TV and advertising--is festooned with breasts and bums and breasts and crotch bulges and breasts and more breasts. The Internet? Please. While there's an occasional flare-up of outrage like Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction' during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime, the tide of de facto prurience--check out the Grammys on TV, or even the red carpet runway show before the Grammys--is unrelenting.
When it comes to art, however, we have a tendency to pull on our bluestockings and haul out the fig leaves. Barely ten years ago a gallery director at Brigham Young University refused to uncrate Rodin's The Kiss for a traveling exhibition. (One wonders how he would have dealt with Magritte's Lovers, which shows a man and woman kissing through the bags over their heads.) Hardly a week goes by without a story about 'inappropriate' art being hustled out of public view. The most hilarious incident I ever witnessed was at the LA County Museum of Art in 1965, when the chicken-wire couple humping in Ed Kienholz's assemblage Back Seat Dodge, '38 had the car doors closed on them during hours when school kids were most likely to wander the galleries. And the best solution I've ever heard comes from Kammen's book: Robert Moses took umbrage at the topless figures representing 'vice' being trod on by a sinless hunk with a club in Frederick MacMonnies's 1922 sculpture Civic Virtue, which stood outside City Hall in Manhattan. So in 1941 Moses had it moved to Borough Hall. In Queens."