 In 1990, a Cincinnati jury acquitted the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, of obscenity charges stemming from an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.In the first criminal trial of an art museum over the contents of an exhibition, the case centered on seven out of 175 photographs in an exhibition ("The Perfect Moment") that traveled from Berkeley to Boston; five of the seven photographs depicted men in sadomasochistic poses and were the basis of charges that the museum and its director had pandered obscenity.Much of the dispute over the Mapplethorpe photographs centered on whether federal money should be used to finance them, through the National Endowment for the Arts.