A show of Serrano’s new work — pictures of excrement, this time around — opens at New York's Yvon Lambert Gallery in September and, who knows, maybe all the controversy it will stir up will be the pot shots New York Post’s gossip column Page Six took the other day. But is the art world better or worse off for not having more of a to-do? The threat of censorship not only made for lively debate, it also reminded us why free speech is so valuable. As much as culture-war grandstanding may have benefited the careers of Helms, Guiliani, and their ilk, it also, paradoxically, may have kept some artists from becoming blandly market-driven. (Consider Plagens’s not unrelated observation made in 1990, at the height of the NEA controversy: He cited as one reason for art having become “driven by guilt” and hence having “turned politically aggressive and sexually explicit” the fact that in the ’80s, so much of it had “pandered so slavishly to the market.”)

Late beat poet Allen Ginsberg once called Helms and co. “legal narcotics pushers wrapped in the flag.” But maybe such pushers serve as a sort of foil. Maybe we need an enemy.

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction.