Contemporary Arts Center

The Perfect Moment triggered some pretty enormous controversies in the art world and beyond, and I wanted to zoom in on just one of those, which played out in what you call the anti-porn capital of the United States, namely Cincinnati.

So when the Contemporary Arts Center in that city prepared to present The Perfect Moment, all hell broke loose, and the museum was eventually taken to court for obscenity.

So one of my favorite parts of your book is this capsule history that you have about just the long-running legal efforts to define obscenity.

[laughs]

Okay.

Right? So that insertion gives people a little more wiggle room than they would have had even four years ago.

So to recap, in Cincinnati, the Contemporary Arts Center programs The Perfect Moment and gets taken to court for exhibiting obscene content.

The Miller test plays an important role in the proceedings, right?

Yeah.

We were down the street also from the, uh, Cincinnati, uh, the Contemporary Arts Center, which was also another really great building that's designed by Zahi-

Zaha Hadid

...

Uh, you play the director of the museum there.

Right, the director of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in 1990 showed, uh, Robert Mapplethorpe's, uh- Uh, photographs, uh, from The Perfect Moment.

It was called The Perfect Moment.

And he, uh, had contracted the show and then it became an extraordinary brouhaha with, uh, the far right and the far left sort of tangling over it.