Public rules

New York City's recent decision to drop charges against a model who disrobed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's armor gallery and singer Adam Lambert's controversial kiss on a televised awards show has got me thinking about the limits of art.

On the one hand, art is not reality, and we make a contract to enter its unreality every time we purchase a ticket to a cultural venue. In those confines, artists are free to use nudity, rough language and simulated sex and violence in the creation of what they define as their art. And we are just as free to avoid their work if we find it offensive.

But there are moments and places, usually public spaces, in which art and reality intersect. (Indeed, it's intersecting more and more nowadays with the ubiquitous phenomenon of the reality show.)

Suppose you wanted to show your 5-year-old some equine armament and came upon the model stripping? Or were practicing your figure eights as Tai Babilonia took to the Rockefeller Center ice in her skivvies for Peta? Or happened to be flipping the channel as Lambert French-kissed another entertainer? (I myself don't care if it was a person of the same or opposite sex.)

It is naive for Lambert to say you can just turn off his performance, which is going out over the airwaves to millions of unsuspecting viewers.

I'm all for art, wherever we can find it. But in a public space, the public rules.