Public trust, private gain

A football season that ended with Janet Jackson having part of her bustier ripped off during the CBS Super Bowl halftime show began last fall with Britney Spears having her pants torn off during an ABC television broadcast. These bookend events are less noteworthy for their T&A quotient than for bracketing a certain commercial angle -- the monstrous hybrid -- which is emerging as a major issue in American cultural life.

Here are three examples, starting with the ABC fiasco:

* The September television show was titled "The NFL Kickoff Live From the National Mall Presented by Pepsi Vanilla." The broadcast was the culmination of a four-day commercial takeover of the Mall -- America's greatest work of landscape design and democracy's hallowed front yard -- by corporate sponsors ranging from Reebok to Coors Light. After Spears' striptease came a videotaped message from President Bush, who declared that the NFL event "celebrates the values that make our country strong." The program led Washington Post television critic Tom Shales to a different conclusion: He lamented that giant corporations had been allowed to "spill a ton of garbage" all over a precious public space.

* In December, a judge held hearings to determine whether a powerful group of Philadelphia business, political and philanthropic leaders, fronted by the chairman of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority, could dismantle the Barnes Foundation, an irreplaceable artifact of early 20th century American cultural history. The Barnes is a suburban school with an extraordinary art collection, displayed in a setting that is the artistic epitome of pragmatist philosophy -- the leading American social doctrine between the Civil War and the Cold War. The coalition's plan was to pluck the famous collection from that unique site and deposit it in a new museum to be built downtown, in hopes that it might become the linchpin of a long-stalled commercial redevelopment project.

* Currently, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts -- among the nation's oldest and most prominent -- is renting out part of its revered collection of French Impressionist paintings to a Las Vegas subsidiary of one of the most powerful corporations in the American art world. The rental, virtually unprecedented in the modern American history of nonprofit art museums, is in direct conflict with professional practices enumerated by the Assn. of Art Museum Directors. The deal is expected to gross in the low seven figures, to be split between the corporation and the art museum.