Obscenity trials and gallery provocations unfolded simultaneously as one New York spectacle

Evidence

Hilariously, it was during the Bruce trial that the art exhibition whose name could not be spoken—The Shit Show, Sam Goodman’s excremental sculptures presented by Boris Lurie—opened at the Gallery Gertrude Stein. Conservative critics rose to the bait. “These aggregations of colonic calligraphy contain many formal excellences for anyone whose purist education forces him to perceive them,” Brian O’Doherty wrote in the Times while Tom Wolfe, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune popped over to the “very elegant” gallery to find “21 piles of sculpted mammal dung” lying on the floor and both artists present, seemingly annoyed that they had to explain their joke. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1911

Categorization

• CANDY: Tom Wolfe counting “21 piles of sculpted mammal dung” is a light, self-contained bit.
• XREF: For the reader: this juxtaposition illustrates how legal repression and taboo-breaking coexisted in the same small downtown ecosystem — regulation actually fed the provocation loop.