By ROBYN MEREDITH (New York Times)
November 23, 1999

Visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts, the grande dame of museums here, could visit a room in the modern gallery to see a toy Jesus wearing a condom, a pile of human excrement and a brazil nut labeled with a racial epithet. For two days.

But the one-room exhibition, containing 15 provocative pieces, was shuttered on Friday after its brief run because of concerns that it would offend the community, and the local artist whose work now stands behind closed doors has accused the museum of censorship.

The museum's director disagrees. ''The museum is always selecting works of art, and selection is not censorship,'' said Graham W. J. Beal, who joined the museum two months ago. ''Asking an artist to exclude one work in favor of another is not censorship.''

The artist saw it differently. ''It would be like if I painted a picture of a nude and they said, 'It might offend some people; why don't you paint a dress on it,' '' said Jef J. Bourgeau, who runs a nonprofit museum in nearby Pontiac, Mich. ''It is push-your-button art, it is aggressive art, but it is art.''

But Mr. Beal saw it more as a question of choosing his battles.

''We have to be the ones comfortable with the position we are taking, and not just say, well, the artist demands it so we are going to put it in the show,'' said Mr. Beal, who likened the situation to that of an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, ''Sensation,'' that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani recently tried unsuccessfully to shut down. ''The museum and art become a political and moral football kicked around by all sorts of people,'' Mr. Beal said.

The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized the decision to close the exhibition, called ''Van Gogh's Ear,'' which opened Wednesday and was to have run through Sunday.

''The essence of modern art in general is to allow people to make up their own mind about art,'' said Kary L. Moss, executive director of the Michigan branch of the A.C.L.U.

Mr. Bourgeau's exhibition was commissioned two years ago, and he had worked with a museum curator in planning it. But the new museum director had not been aware of what the exhibition would contain before it opened, said a museum spokeswoman, Annmarie Erickson.

It was meant to explore how artists are intertwined with the art they create, particularly in the context of artists who had gained notoriety in the 1990's, Mr. Bourgeau said.

One item on display is a jar of urine, labeled as that used in Andres Serrano's photograph of a submerged cross. ''It was supposed to be the actual urine used, but it wasn't,'' Mr. Bourgeau said.

Similarly, there is a video that purports to be the work of British artist Tracey Emin, showing her taking a shower while menstruating. But another naked woman is on the screen. And the Jesus with a condom is attributed to Chris Ofili, the artist whose ''Holy Virgin Mary'' painting is adorned with elephant dung at the Brooklyn museum. Despite the label, it is meant to be taken as the pretend response of Mr. Ofili to the controversy created by his work.

''Some people understand and some people don't,'' Mr. Bourgeau said. And so in a post-modern spectacle of its own, art pretending to be that of controversial artists of the past has become controversial itself.

Mr. Beal, who said he turned down the ''Sensation'' exhibit while director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said that it was sometimes appropriate for museums to show art likely to offend, but that it was not warranted in this case.

''They were afraid somebody might be offended -- nobody ever was,'' said Mr. Bourgeau, who added few people had seen the exhibit. ''The show was closed and censored from the inside, which is a new and disturbing twist for the art world. Ten years ago the director of the Corcoron was fired for canceling the Mapplethorpe show before it ever arrived. Now, we laud a museum director for shutting down a show in its first week. Maybe, in a sad way, this is the history of the 90’s artworld playing out. In the midst of it all, we've got this huge controversy over work no one's ever seen.''