Yenawine is co-editor of the new book "Art Matters: How The Culture Wars Changed America" (NYU Press, 1999), which details the ways in which the arts funding crisis of the '80s and early '90s drastically reshaped our culture. With essays by Lucy Lippard, Andrea Fraiser, Lewis Hyde and others, it chronicles a major shift in the role of visual art in public life, and examines how that shift has altered our understanding of censorship, democracy and indeed all of pop culture.

During that pivotal era, Yenawine was director of education at New York's Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA) and one of the most powerful champions of controversial art that
few were willing to embrace. As head of the nonprofit Visual AIDS, he helped launch
both the now-ubiquitous red ribbon project and "A Day Without Art" (which is still observed by most art institutions each Dec.1). During the censorship/funding crisis of 1989 and '90, Yenawine testified on behalf of the NEA before the House of Representatives, and later was an expert witness for the artist David Wojnarowicz when he sued the American Family Association for wrongfully representing his work as porn.

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If you ask a member of the burgeoning field of masturbation theory, the
answer may be: absolutely everything. Some of academia's finest scholars
these days are making serious work out of the study of -- well, diddling
oneself.

This brave new academic frontier opened 10 years ago at the annual
conference of the Modern Language Association with a panel called "The
Muse of Masturbation." There Eve Sedgwick, who has since become the queen of queer theory, delivered her notorious paper, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." Regarded as proof that the humanities had at last decayed beyond repair, the MLA panel caused an angry ruckus both inside and outside the ivory tower. Every solo-love scholar I surveyed had stories about personal attacks at departmental events, dissertation advisors who wouldn't say the M-word and balking publishers.

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