It's an admirable project to want to liberate Mapplethorpe from the controversy that made him notorious and to reveal the gifts that his admirers believe his infamy overshadowed. But this show has the effect of removing the unresolved tension between the social and artistic that made Mapplethorpe's photographs so thick with moral and aesthetic dilemma. In the entirely art-historical context that the show attempts to provide, Mapplethorpe's work seems to need to be completed by the very sensationalist content for which he was vilified. So, you have to wonder about the ulterior motives of the organizers of this exhibition. Were they expressing a newfound modesty on the part of cultural liberals? Is this simply a case of a prestigious museum trying to boost the reputation of Mapplethorpe's less-characteristic pictures by trying to make them appear more typical of his sensibility? Fifteen years after the dark side of Mapplethorpe's imagination made the politics of NEA-funding a public issue, one type of politics or another has purged Mapplethorpe's imagination of its dark originality But, then, the hidden violence of a public embrace is maybe the dirtiest private secret of them all.