Introduction

There is probably no point at which the cultural value of art is brought more clearly into public view than when art creates a scandal. This is nothing new. In 1815, for example, Goya's Nude Maja (La Maja Desnuda) created a public stir that landed the artist in front of the Spanish Inquisition, where he was forced to answer charges of obscenity. The work, today considered an icon of cultural value, was deemed culturally destructive by some authorities at the time.

Similar controversies about cultural value erupt periodically to this day. Over the past 20 years, scandals have erupted on numerous occasions in the United States, in which government funds have gone to subsidize the production or exhibition of art considered by some to be obscene, blasphemous, or offensively unpatriotic. The resulting value clashes between opponents and supporters of the offending art have constituted battles in America's so-called culture wars between one group that is traditional, conservative, and religious, and the other that is permissive, liberal, and secular (Himmelfarb 1999).

There are few better examples of a battle over the cultural value of art than the infamous Sensation exhibit at New York City's Brooklyn Museum of Art.