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"  When I met an old friend for lunch in New York a couple of Christmases ago, she didn&amp;#039;t even bother to sit down before launching into a blistering description of the humiliation she&amp;#039;d just suffered with her kids. They&amp;#039;d been visiting the Maccarone gallery in Greenwich Village, she said, when they found themselves in front of an installation: a chocolate factory by the always naughty performance artist Paul McCarthy that was turning out identical little candy treats in the shape of a fat, beaming St. Nick holding a sex toy. What was that in Santa&amp;#039;s hands, her children begged to know? My friend was hardly a prude, and I searched in vain for a high-minded response to her reaction to this work of wicked provocation (the title of which it seems better not to mention). As it happened, I&amp;#039;d recently been given just such a chocolate as a friendly, um, stocking stuffer. (Thanks, Secret Santa.) Now I wondered if I should eat it privately on Christmas Eve or just tuck it away in a closet before anyone of tender sensibilities laid eyes on it. Whatever one&amp;#039;s response to such a spectacle may be, McCarthy had done something that&amp;#039;s hard to do these days: offend someone who would not generally be considered a philistine. Pushing the boundaries of taste and acceptability is as old as Pompeii, where the cultural elite of the day enjoyed dining and bathing below colorful mosaics of sexual engagement. Work that skirts the edges of the pornographic or toys with the obscene has a pedigree as long as some royal families. But how to react to such work when you find it surprisingly on display at a dinner party, or on the wall of someone&amp;#039;s house when you drop off your four-year-old for a birthday party, has become a bit more complicated.  This issue is not trivial to Scotland Yard. In 2009 it pulled a 1992 Richard Prince piece \u2014 the appropriation artist had simply reframed the original Garry Gross photograph of a naked and underage Brooke Shields \u2014 from the Tate Modern&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Pop Life&amp;quot; exhibition. But now that collecting art has become a national pastime for the private-equity set \u2014 whether they live in New York, London, or Benton, Arkansas \u2014 and a younger and more voracious class of collectors has established itself, many are eager to follow wherever their favorite artists lead, and there&amp;#039;s been no shortage of bad boy (and bad girl) practitioners to meet the demand. Some simply play with dicey materials or push their work just past the edge more artfully than their peers. Admiration for this work is not unanimous outside Scotland Yard, either. There are those, for instance, who argue that these artists are using the sanctity of art&amp;#039;s mantle to indulge in adolescent acts of transgression. There are others who consider adolescent acts of transgression pretty rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll. But with collecting becoming more commonplace, it&amp;#039;s almost statistically inevitable that these works will raise somebody&amp;#039;s eyebrows over dinner \u2014 a boss, a neighbor, the parent of your child&amp;#039;s best friend, a prospective in-law.  One common reaction is to ignore the obvious and uncomfortable, but kids are especially ready to respond, often quite loudly. One friend calls this type of occasion the &amp;quot;Weiner moment,&amp;quot; after the time a nine-year-old invited his parents&amp;#039; dinner companions to come to his bedroom and &amp;quot;inspect his Weiner&amp;quot; \u2014 referring to an otherwise chaste text piece that conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner had painted on his wall. The gutsier the collection, the more likely the Weiner moment. Marty Eisenberg, an executive at Bed Bath and Beyond and a voracious bellwether collector of contemporary art, was having dinner with his wife and parents a few years ago at their Scarsdale, New York, home. &amp;quot;We were seated around the kitchen table eating,&amp;quot; Eisenberg says, &amp;quot;when my mother looked up and commented on a provocative image hanging on the wall. My daughter Suzanne, who was eight at the time, said, &amp;#039;That&amp;#039;s nothing. You should see the painting of those lesbians sucking on each other&amp;#039;s nipples that&amp;#039;s hanging in their bedroom&amp;#039; \u2014 a dead-on reference to Nicole Eisenman&amp;#039;s Tunnel of Love, which was above our dresser. We changed topics immediately.&amp;quot; The exchange goes both ways. The artist Walton Ford, a social satirist of sorts whose Audubon-like watercolors frequently depict animals in compromising and flagrantly sexual situations, recalled that his father was always bragging about his son&amp;#039;s success but couldn&amp;#039;t bring himself to show the art to the family, thanks to a nonagenarian aunt who could not be counted on to admire a 10-by-20-foot piece depicting an elephant with an oversize erection. &amp;quot;A book of my work would come out, and it would be like, &amp;#039;Aw, man, I can&amp;#039;t show this to Aunt Frances!&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Ford says. &amp;quot;I should have just gotten hold of a catalog and cut the pages out myself.&amp;quot; One dealer told me that he&amp;#039;d recently come to realize that the canvas he had by a prominent Manhattan artist that featured Freud on the receiving end of a stream of urine might not be the thing to have up during a playdate. &amp;quot;The nanny has alluded to the fact that the other nannies think we&amp;#039;re crazy,&amp;quot; he says. Even when kids aren&amp;#039;t involved, many collectors adopt a better-safe-than-sorry strategy. &amp;quot;A few years ago I was hosting a benefit for New York senator Charles Schumer,&amp;quot; collector Joe Barron recalls. &amp;quot;And I had Piotr Uklanski&amp;#039;s The Nazis \u2014 a frieze of 122 portraits depicting actors (Yul Brynner, Ronald Reagan, and Charles Bronson among them) portraying various shades of Gestapo, SS officers, and Hitler Youth \u2014 hanging in the apartment.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I thought I should call the senator&amp;#039;s office to make sure he knew I was not a Nazi.&amp;quot; In the end, the piece stayed up, Schumer and his entourage said nothing of it, and to this day no one has accused Barron of National Socialist Party membership.  Certainly one clause in the social contract involves going out of one&amp;#039;s way not to offend one&amp;#039;s neighbors, but what are the options when it can&amp;#039;t be avoided? One is to chalk it up to what makes contemporary art interesting, and not worry about it too much. Nancy Magoon (and her husband Bob, a retired ophthalmologist and onetime record-setting offshore power boat racing champ) proudly keeps the bulk of her collection, which includes a number of envelope-pushing works (both politically and sexually) by the likes of Tracey Emin, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and the Chapman Brothers on view in her Aspen home. &amp;quot;I subscribe to the Christo philosophy,&amp;quot; she jokes. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t look at it until it&amp;#039;s covered up.&amp;quot;  Subterfuge is another time-honored, if imperfect, practice. When, in the mid-1950s, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan acquired Gustave Courbet&amp;#039;s L&amp;#039;Origine du Monde \u2014 one of the most daring masterpieces of the 19th century \u2014 he cunningly asked his stepbrother, Surrealist painter Andr\u00E9 Masson, to design a wooden panel to cover the canvas (which now hangs in the Mus\u00E9e d&amp;#039;Orsay). But Masson duplicated the full-frontal pose of the model in the painting, and Lacan wound up with a covering as lurid as the work it concealed. There&amp;#039;s also the famous story of the Greek tycoon Stavros Niarchos, who did such an immaculate job of keeping Balthus&amp;#039;s 1934 The Guitar Lesson cloistered in the boudoir of his Fifth Avenue mansion that this scene of sapphic sadism was long thought lost, before its hiding place was revealed in the 1990s. This is a problem not just for private collections but for gallery shows, too. When Luxembourg &amp;amp;amp; Dayan recently exhibited &amp;quot;Made in Heaven,&amp;quot; Jeff Koons&amp;#039;s 1991 series of photos of coital bliss with his then-wife, the porn star Cicciolina (n\u00E9e Ilona Staller), the gallery was flooded with a type of visitor not often seen trolling the Upper East Side art scene after the show was featured as a must-see in a XXX guide of things to do while visiting New York. &amp;quot;We had to hide the catalog,&amp;quot; says the gallery&amp;#039;s director, Alissa Bennett. Sometimes tastes differ even between spouses. &amp;quot;When our Chapman Brothers piece was shipped,&amp;quot; one gracious collector told me, &amp;quot;my husband opened up the package. He was so taken aback that he put it in the closet, and it remained there.&amp;quot; The owner is happy to display her Schieles and Currans but admits that their example of the Chapmans&amp;#039; work, with its preteen nudity and freak show mutations, now resides permanently behind locked doors in their Upper East Side apartment. &amp;quot;For those I don&amp;#039;t think will be totally shocked, I&amp;#039;ll give them the key,&amp;quot; she says. Still, the solution isn&amp;#039;t fail-safe. &amp;quot;We have grandchildren who found out where the key was and liked to show it to their friends.&amp;quot; But who wants to keep a favorite work locked up in a closet? The financial analyst Alvin Hall decided to divest himself of an early photograph by Katy Grannan of a Botticelli-esque nude with a not-so-Renaissance-era bikini wax. Hall, who is African-American, says, &amp;quot;A lot of my black friends would come over and say, &amp;#039;Alvin, why do you want a picture of a naked white woman hanging in your apartment?&amp;#039; I just saw it as a work, but a lot of these friends were bothered by it. They were intrigued by the waxing in particular.&amp;quot; He eventually grew tired of the entreaties and, much as he loved the piece, sold it to a single-father friend with a young child. Now he wonders what the current owner tells his \u2014 and his kid&amp;#039;s \u2014 guests. Lubricious art can at least serve as an effective friendship filter. Defriending is one fast solution. &amp;quot;I give no consideration to where I put art based on guests&amp;#039; sensitivities,&amp;quot; Barron says. &amp;quot;Anyone who has a bad reaction, I&amp;#039;d show them the door.&amp;quot; Ford adds that he&amp;#039;d just as soon not know when somebody was offended. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve had collectors who turn a work down because of the content \u2014 they&amp;#039;ve got kids, etc.,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I tell the gallery basically not to tell me about it anymore.&amp;quot; But maybe those collectors are missing out on more than a dirty smirk. The owner of the closeted Chapmans work is now proud of its powerful effect. &amp;quot;It aroused my grandchildren&amp;#039;s curiosity, and in many ways it got them interested in art. They can relate to figurative work. That&amp;#039;s not always the case with abstract paintings.&amp;quot; In the end, it may be that people aren&amp;#039;t as easily offended as they used to be, that so many instances of highly refined pornography have inured the majority of viewers \u2014 Scotland Yard excepted \u2014 to any remaining shock value. In the Time Warner building in New York, a 12-foot-tall male nude Botero sculpture has become a kind of kitschy tourist magnet. The statue is twice life-size, which leaves many visitors at an unfortunate eye level. Yet so many have taken the opportunity to rub the sculpture in that no longer private area that the dark bronze patina on that particular segment of the anatomy has to be regularly restored.  But sometimes it&amp;#039;s not sex that riles up the citizenry. For the Aspen neighbors of the Magoons, what really crossed the line wasn&amp;#039;t the dicey artwork on their walls but the Nancy Rubins sculpture made of hot water tanks and pipe fittings that they installed on their lawn. In the art world, the work is seen as a wry domestic commentary on a muscular sculptural tradition. But on a neighbor&amp;#039;s lawn, it can be viewed as junk. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got a Noble and Webster with penises all over it,&amp;quot; Nancy Magoon says. &amp;quot;But they made us out to be pariahs over those hot water tanks.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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