Arts and the State.

This article presents the author's brief account of his visit to the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The controversy that has dogged the show since its organization by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia certainly made itself felt in the huge numbers of visitors and in the aura of decorous excitement that enveloped those who managed to get in. Most of the pictures, however, were unexciting. With the exception of a handful of striking images from the artist's last years, there were celebrity portraits shot in 1940s fashion style, arty flowers, naked black men in a venerable art-nude tradition.