For a guy who just appointed a decency commission, Mayor Giuliani doesn't always do the decent thing.

Take last week, for example. Finding himself under fire for appointing a committee to draw up "decency standards" for public art, the mayor assured us all that there was no need to worry because his new committee was not new at all; that it was, in fact, a revived version of the old "Advisory Commission for Cultural Affairs" from the 1970s.

Well, sorry to contradict the mayor, but the Gnome did a little checking (very little, I assure you) and found that the original commission had nothing to do with creating standards -- decency or otherwise -- for public art.

As it turned out, I was not alone in thinking that Mayor Giuliani was twisting history. Indeed, members of the original "Advisory Commission for Cultural Affairs" -- which was created by Mayor Beame in 1975 to foster the CREATION of public art not the curtailment of it -- blasted the mayor for indecently distorting their purpose.

"Our commission was not about censoring art or devising so-called `decency' standards," said one commission member who could not give his (or is it HER?) name out of fear of mayoral recrimination.

"That committee was about funding art. We hosted ethnic festivals, film festivals, the Philharmonic in Central Park. I can't believe that New York would allow the mayor to convene a `decency' committee -- in this day and age!"

Another commission member, C. Douglas Dillon, agreed.

"It was never about censorship," said the former Treasury secretary and Metropolitan Museum president. "It was an advisory panel to ensure arts funding."
Going back through the archives (don't worry, I didn't break a sweat), I learned that Mayor Beame wanted his commission to usher in "a new era in the cultural life of the city" and "preserve and promote all the arts."

That's a far cry from Mayor Giuliani's panel, which will "examine situations in which [a piece of art] is an affront, an attack, a debasement of religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, gender." The long-term goal is to debate whether the city should even be in the culture business at all.

The makeup of the two panels were also quite different. Mayor Beame's commission included heavyweights in the cultural community -- the chairman of Lincoln Center, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the director of the Museum of the City of New York -- while Mayor Giuliani's synod is a roster of lightweights that includes the mayor's divorce lawyer, the wife of an extremely conservative State Senator, an artist who specializes in sycophantic portraits of corporate executives, Richard Nixon's lawyer and a radio host whose greatest contribution to the art world is his saucy red beret, an obvious homage to Picasso and Dali.

Martin E. Segal, the chairman of Beame's original commission, was appalled.

"This committee should not assume any responsibility over what should or should not be in museums," Segal, still feisty at 85, said. "Those decisions should rest with curators and museum directors, not the mayor."

Segal rejected the mayor's claim that the city should not be in the business of subsidizing institutions that display art that offends people, such as the photo of a nude female Christ that offended the mayor earlier this year or the painting of a dung-adorned black Virgin Mary that offended the mayor last year.

"The government should not be involved in matters of taste," Segal said, extending the argument beyond art museums to other city-funded institutions. 

"Suppose the mayor didn't like your column one week," he said, delving into a world of sheer impossibility (not like my column? Inconceivable!). "If the government only funded what it approved of, what would prevent it from defunding libraries that carried your newspaper or denying permits to newsstand owners who wanted to carry your newspaper?"

Only a sense of decency, I guess.

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