Crying censorship: shocking the bourgeoisie--it's nice work if you can get it.

• Author: Miller, Cheryl

IN 1921 the Metropolitan Museum of Art held its first show devoted to modern painting. Outraged observers denounced it as "degenerate" a mass of "Bolshevic [sic] philosophy" and "art-trash." One of the featured painters, Robert Henri, saw in the public's reaction the "modern idea of prohibiting" taken too far. "We can't drink any more," he protested. "Surely we ought to be allowed to ruin ourselves looking at pictures."

We eventually got our drinks back, but the pictures remain controversial. Michael Kammen's Visual Shock (Knopf) recounts America's major art controversies since the 1830s. Taking the idea of a "healthy controversy" from a Dwight Eisenhower speech, Kammen argues that art controversies are a sign of a thriving, democratic culture.

A Cornell historian, Kammen is strictly, sometimes maddeningly, even-handed: He refrains from all aesthetic judgments about the art he describes, even when it is literally a pile of shit--a motif so popular that it merits its own entry in the index. See, for example, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni's installation of canned excrement, Merda d'artista (1961), which in an impressive act of alchemy sold for the price of gold.

The idea that art should shock is by no means new. But the stakes have been raised so high that it's now almost impossible to do anything shocking. It's no longer enough just to plop a pile of feces on the museum floor. To shock the bourgeoisie these days, you have to combine the crap with racial slurs, as Jef Bourgeau did with his Detroit Institute of Arts exhibit Van Gogh's Ear. It included both a heap of feces and a Brazil nut titled Nigger Toe. And that was in 1999. God knows what would be necessary now.

For all the cries of censorship, American artists rarely suffer for being offensive. Sometimes they can make a pretty penny at it. In one particularly egregious episode, critics accused the advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi of using the public furor over Sensation!, his 1999 show of young British artists at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, to inflate the value of his collection. The two artists most denounced--Damien Hirst, for a shark suspended in formaldehyde, and Chris Ofili, for his elephant-dung Virgin Mary--both won Turner Prizes and saw their work bring hundreds of thousands of dollars at the auction block.

Unlike crying wolf, crying censorship never seems to backfire. In 1932, when a group of artists complained that museums and patrons were ignoring their work, the Museum...