On Nov. 17, the Detroit Institute of Arts opened the first installment of an exhibit entitled "Van Gogh's Ear," scheduled to run for 12 weeks. Among the artistic creations on view: a toy lesus wearing a condom, a pile of human excrement, a film of a woman taking a shower while menstruating, and a brazil nut labeled "Nigger."

Shock art of this kind, of course, is nothing new. Every year, it seems, controversy erupts as another publicly funded museum plays host to such works. Most recently, the Brooklyn Museum of Art grabbed the spotlight with "Sensation," a British exhibit boasting statues of children with genitals on their faces, and a dung-spattered Virgin Mary surrounded by pornographic images. Patrons were coyly advised that the show might induce vomiting.

What is new in Detroit is that the museum director, Graham Beal, closed "Van Gogh's Ear" two days after it opened. Beal, who had become director two months before, had been unaware of the show's content, and ordered it shuttered after he saw it. Next morning, he awoke to find his picture in the New York Times, and to hear ominous rumblings from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Beal's action has, predictably, provoked indignant cries of censorship. But the charge of censorship -- nonsensical in America in 1999 -- rings particularly hollow in this case. Graham Beal is hardly Rudy Giuliani or Jesse Helms, the sort of "benighted, meddlesome" public official that many in the art world love to hate. On the contrary, he is one of the art world's own, with impeccable credentials in the area of contemporary art. (Bear's impressive resume includes a stint at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he was chief curator in the early 1980s.)

How does Beal explain his decision to close "Van Gogh's Ear"? He frames the issue as one not of censorship, but of curatorial judgment. "The museum is always selecting works of art, he notes, "and selection is not censorship." Indeed, the essence of a museum director's role is to choose, from the vast array of art objects available, the small number he or she deems most worthy of public attention and support.

In short, Beal's decision was an act -- not of censorship -- but of stewardship. Censorship, after all, is government action to suppress an idea or a work of art, i.e. to remove it altogether from the public arena. Clearly, however "Van Gogh's Ear" has not been banned. Its creator, Jef Bourgeau has moved it to a new location, where anyone who wishes to may view it. Beal judged that his tax-supported museum was not the proper venue for Bourgeau's work. Such work -- if it deserves display at all -- belongs in a cutting-edge gallery devoted to the ever-shifting contemporary art scene.

The problem with shows like "Van Gogh's Ear" goes beyond their "offensiveness." Art worth seeing may sometimes be offensive to some patrons. The real question for public museum directors contemplating such exhibits is more fundamental: Is the art in question good art?

Today, unfortunately, that's a question it takes some courage to ask. For the very idea of good art -- of generally accepted standards of quality, of connoisseurship -- is under savage assault in influential sectors of the art world. Why? Art critic Roger Kimball lays the blame on "the institutionalization of the avant garde."

Avant-garde art was born about 100 years ago as a reaction against what many artists viewed as a stuffy and confining Victorian culture. The movement had significant creative power, which hinged on its posture of defiance. But middle-class resistance evaporated quickly. Within a few decades, the avant-garde had become the establishment, as the middle class rushed to embrace art intended to insult them. (The French artist Marcel Duchamp put it succinctly: "I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.") According to Kimball, the result was predictable. "Without a vigorous tradition to oppose, the avant-garde decline(d) into a series of narcissistic soliloquies, raging against an illusory enemy that (was) only too happy to subsidize its tantrums."

The attack on artistic standards gathered steam at the very time that art became big business. As standards faded, anything and everything laid claim to being art. In the contemporary art world, the driving question became not "what's good?" but "what's new?" In response, wrote critic Albert Thibaudet, many artists embraced a new ambition: "to occupy that extreme point, to attain for an hour that crest of the wave in a tossing sea."

Who profits from this development? Clearly, people who want to be "artists," but lack real talent. In today's brave new art world, observes Kimball, such people can now "make up for their lack of actual accomplishment with a combination of egotism, shamelessness and an acute marketing sensibility." Their rule is simple: "When in doubt, just add bodily fluids or waste products." Better yet, highlight exotic sexual practices, or lampoon orthodox Christianity.

In the past, human beings could look to art to uplift, delight or move them. They counted on it, in Kimball's words, to deliver them, "if but momentarily, from the poverty and incompleteness of everyday life." Today, however, art is in danger of becoming a wholly negative enterprise. Far from uplifting us, much contemporary art merely aims -- in vapid and predictable ways to shock, repulse or disconcert us.

Today, contemporary art does not lead the popular culture, but limps along behind it. Why climb in the car to see "Van Gogh's Ear" when we can achieve the same sort of experience by flipping the channel to TV's raunchy "South Park"? Ultimately, shows like "Van Gogh's Ear" -- intended to send shivers down our spine -- provoke only yawns. If it's shock we want, we'd do better to rent "Friday the Thirteenth." Who needs art museums?

-- Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.