The Scene of the Crime

Abstract

This article was originally delivered as the keynote address at the seventy-ninth annual convocation of the College Art Association, February 22,1991, in Washington, D.C. The author, director of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, was indicted in 1990 and subsequently acquitted on charges of pandering to obscenity and the illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented materials in an exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, titled “The Perfect Moment? (See pp. 14–28 for some of the images from that exhibition.)