The mere thought of Helms has been enough to scare curators from exhibiting in the U.S. As recently as 2001, Jean-Jacques Lebel, curator of the exhibition “Picasso Erotique” at the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, cited the senator (who was soon to retire) as a reason for keeping the show off U.S. soil: “If politicians like Jesse Helms can attack Serrano and Mapplethorpe, they would not hesitate to attack Picasso.”

The senator had a way of, shall we say, creatively misinterpreting artworks. As Karen Finley pointed out, it was he who eroticized her performance, in which she smeared chocolate on her body in protest of the abuse of women. “My work was taken out of context and eroticized by Helms,” she told the press, adding that she felt that she was made out to be “a crazy woman with jaws between my legs and snakes coming out of my head.” If that sounds like an overreaction, a British documentary captured Helms, on the Senate floor, describing how Finley “smeared chocolate on herself and invited the public to… how to put it delicately… well, I guess there’s no way… to come up and conduct a g-g-gynecological examination.” (Let’s not forget that Helms’ objections to the NEA began when Erica Jong’s racy novel Fear of Flying caught his eye back in 1974.)

Soon others who had taken his lead were doing their own creative misinterpretations. The Reverend Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association — which art critic Robert Hughes dubbed a “religious hit squad” — practiced appropriation art. In 1990 Wildmon used snippets of New York gay painter, performance artist, and activist David Wojnarowicz’s artworks — which included such provocative images as a collage depicting Christ wearing a crown of thorns and shooting heroin — to dress up a pamphlet called “Your Dollars Helped Pay for These ‘Works of Art’”; Wojnarowicz responded by successfully suing him.

Helms was certainly no aesthete, but he clearly relished aesthetic debates. He may have summed up his beliefs best when in 1989 he told the New York Times, as the Times’s recent obituary reminded readers, “I like beautiful things, not modern art. I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building.” He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.

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Still, no one can deny Helm’s indelible imprint on the art world. His outrage certainly gave artists a popularity boost. Would Finley have made Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year, were it not for Helms? Or, as then Newsweek critic Peter Plagens put it in 1990, “The only consistent thing about official condemnation of art is that it almost always means more sales and attendance for the offender.”

“[Mapplethorpe] died a multimillionaire [in part] because of the ranting queer hatred of Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, and the religious right,” Robert Hughes wrote in 1995. Eight years ago, in a review in the Art Newspaper of “Dirty Pictures,” a program on Showtime that dramatized the Mapplethorpe controversy, critic David D’Arcy quoted Harley Baldwin of Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, which handles sales from the Mapplethorpe Estate, saying, “There are plenty of people who still want to own something that Jesse Helms says is bad.” Exit values; enter value.

If Helms’s behavior during the NEA crisis is hardly remembered fondly, some people managed to find an upside even at the time. In the dark days of July 1990, while Robertson et al were hashing it out on Crossfire, an organization called the Theatre Communication Group, composed of actors, director, authors and the like, had gathered in Northampton, Massachusetts, for their biennial meeting, this one devoted to the subject of censorship. The keynote speech was given by historian and playwright Charles L. Mee, Jr., who said, “It’s when artists are not being attacked that something is really wrong.”

If this is true — if we can presume that strong work is bound to offend somebody — no one should balk at today’s censorship skirmishes, such as the brouhaha over Bill Henson’s photographs of children in Australia and, subsequently, that country’s prime minister’s upset over a photograph of a nude child on the cover of an art magazine. Or a government official’s attack on Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora, a sculpture showing a pope felled by a meteor. Or the fact that the under-16 set won't be allowed into Tracey Emin's upcoming Edinburgh retrospective without a guardian.