The Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum

At the height of the controversy over government funding for “obscene” works of art, internationally renowned conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth created “The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable”, an exhibit about censorship. His installation, one of the best-attended, most widely reviewed of the year, juxtaposed works of art from throughout history that had been deemed politically, religiously, or sexually objectionable, with statements about the role of art in society by writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Adolf Hitler, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This handsome book documents the exhibit with twenty-one pages of color and more than a hundred duotone photographs along with a major essay by art historian David Freedberg.