Likely responding to Helms and co., the Corcoran soon canceled a planned exhibition of photographs — including images of nude men in provocative poses — by Mapplethorpe. This prompted protesters to project Mapplethorpe images onto the museum’s exterior. (Ironically, it might have been this that alerted Helms to the artist's imagery in the first place.) The Washington Project for the Arts picked up the canceled show, and it then traveled to Hartford and Berkeley, where it provoked little outrage. However, when it opened in spring 1990 at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center — because of the controversy, it attracted record crowds — the director of that museum, Dennis Barrie, was tried on an obscenity charge, of which he was later acquitted.

Helms, with the help of a few others, managed to push through Congress a pledge that all NEA grant recipients had to sign, a kind of “anti-obscenity oath” ensuring the organization that their work kept to the “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” In 1990, the performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck were denied grants due to the sexual content of their work. (Hughes, Miller, and Fleck were all openly gay; Finley smeared her naked body in chocolate.) The “NEA four” — as the artists became known — took legal action, settling out of court in 1993, but the “decency test” (in October 1990, congress repealed the obscenity ban in favor of a “decency” requirement) was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998. Throughout this period there was even talk of scrapping the NEA altogether, especially after the Newt Gingrich–led Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995, despite the fact that only a small fraction of those who received grants made work that could be considered obscene, by any standard.

Helms was never one to shy away from theatrics. He didn’t just object to Mapplethorpe’s photos, he mailed them to fellow lawmakers, asking “whether the taxpayers’ money should be used to fund this sort of thing.” Before handing out prints of the images in the Senate chamber, he would take care that there were no women or pages around. In 1989, he quipped, “Now if artists want to go in a men’s room and write dirty words on the wall, let them furnish their own crayons. Let them furnish their own walls. But don’t ask the tax payers to support it.” He called Serrano a “jerk” on the Senate floor. In a letter deriding Piss Christ, he described the photo as a “sickening, abhorrent, and shocking act by an arrogant blasphemer.” He described Mapplethorpe’s show as “an abyss of slime.” He called Holly Hughes a “sewer” artist.

Of course, he had bigger fish to fry than the artists themselves. What he was really after were lifestyle choices. “They cry ‘censorship,’” he said of arts advocates in 1991. “And they know that’s false. They have hidden from the public what the issue really is. And it’s indecency and rottenness, homosexuality, sodomy, bestiality.”

Helms’s name comes up nearly every time censorship rears its ugly head in the art world. Ten years after the Piss Christ debates, it bubbled to the surface when New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani blasted the Brooklyn Museum for displaying Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary embellished by elephant dung. Giuliani said the piece was sacrilegious and took steps to set up a decency commission. In response to the uproar, artist Hans Haacke made Sanitation, an installation for the 2000 Whitney Biennial involving a set of rubbish bins, a soundtrack of marching troops, and, inscribed alongside American flags on the wall above the bins, Giuliani’s comments, as well as pro-censorship quotes from NEA-bashers Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Helms. (Haacke had already made Helms his bette noire. In Helmsboro Country [1990], he superimposed the senator's face on an outsized pack of cigarettes, evoking the North Carolinian’s ties to the tobacco industry. And Haacke wasn’t the only artist inspired by Helms’s pronouncements. In what sounds like a considerably more humorous approach, Lucio Pozzi created the piece Helmsman’s Fear [1990], which consisted of, in Pozzi’s own description, a portrait of the senator staring from eyeless sockets at the genitals of a huge male nude photo.)