By: Terry Lawson

A more cynical person than I could conclude that the ever-ailing Detroit Institute of Arts learned a valuable lesson from "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection," the show that is breaking all records at the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Museum of Art: Censor it, and they will come.

Last weekend, the museum opened an exhibit called "Art Until Now," but just as quick it was padlocked after DIA chief curator David Penney got a look at some of the pieces in the show by Detroit artist Jef Bourgeau.

In what might be deemed serious parodies of sincere satires, some of Bourgeau’s installations – an art world term for work that isn’t really sculpture but doesn’t fit inside a frame – reference the more controversial art of recent years. One is the piece from "Sensation" that set New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani’s comb-over on end: Bourgeau trumped "The Holy Virgin Mary," a Madonna splattered with elephant dung, with "Bathtub Jesus," a baby doll in a washtub wearing a condom.

This is not anything I would normally run out to see during the holiday season, but now that the DIA has elected to protect me from it, I feel all but duty-bound. When the normal desire to see what all the fuss is about gets attached to issues of personal liberty, well, that’s the stuff hits are made of. If the DIA ultimately decides not to mount Bourgeau’s show, its artistic merit becomes instantly secondary to its controversy quotient. And that should ensure its success somewhere, if not the DIA.

To wit, two recent films, "Dogma" and "Romance." "Dogma," a sophomoric if sincere comedy that takes on Roman Catholic Church teachings and tenets, became a target of the Catholic League.

The attention turned a movie even its own writer and director Kevin Smith called flawed and crude into a minor hit that earned more than $10 million its first week at the box office. It’s ironic that one of the big-budget films it bested was the historical epic "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc," which gave Catholics a far harder rap than "Dogma."

Contrast that reaction with "Romance," a French drama that included well-publicized scenes of actual sex. The film’s distributors all but invited legal action and made a large to-do when some newspapers refused to accept advertising for the unrated film. But when the film opened at Royal Oak’s Main Art Theatre, local prosecutors ignored it, and for the most part, so did audiences.

An argument can always be made that controversial, offensive or explicit art should not be casually displayed: When Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center mounted its infamous Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, it put the homoerotic photographs in a private room that was restricted to adults. That didn’t deter Cincinnati prosecutors.

When police announced they would confiscate the photographs and file charges if they were shown, people who in ordinary circumstances couldn’t have been forced at gunpoint to look at men sticking things in one another’s orifices lined up for hours to see what they were told they shouldn’t.

There are a lot of people who don’t want to be told what they can or can’t see. Morality may be a personal matter, but there’s still an obvious moral in this story.