Free Speech vs. Art

Help me, here's where I almost start to agree with the ACLU (not quite though).  Recently an exhibit entitled Sensation was displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  A variety of "works of art" were designed to "stimulate the senses;" these included animals encased in formaldehyde and a depiction of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung on one breast and quite literally butts from porn mags around her face.  Naturally a great percentage of the public was appalled and protested (the only time you'll see animal rights activists and the Christian Coalition on the same side), while the usual radical "defenders" of free speech such as the ACLU rose to support the exhibit as free expression and a valid form of art.  New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani (oh please let him defeat Hillary in the Senate race) objected to the exhibit, calling it "Catholic bashing" (only one of his names for it) and pulled the Museum's funding, which naturally spawned the typical debate over how far public funding for the arts should go.
  Is the exhibit free speech?  Yes.  Is it art?  No.  I tolerate it as free speech because we can't go around censoring everything that's remotely offensive to anyone.  As an animal-loving Catholic I am highly, highly offended by it but I deal with it.  (I find it highly ironic, not to mention hypocritical, that many liberals blatantly support displays like these but at the same time insist on political correctness.)  I refuse to see it as art; however, and have no problem with Rudy pulling funding from the museum (no one ever said free speech needed funding).  My handy-dandy American Heritage College Dictionary defines art as "the conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium."  I can't see how a mutilated pig's head would be beautiful to anyone besides an animal sadist.  As a lover of the fine arts I greatly support public funding of them but that does not mean that there cannot be some sort of standard, given that 99% of Americans could hardly call a display such as Sensation beautiful.  By these standards one could urinate a cross on the sidewalk, rope it off, call it art, and demand funding for upkeep.
  Yes, I know many great works of art could be viewed as objectionable (Michelangelo's David comes to mind).  But is it objectionable to the vast majority of its viewers?  I am not one to say how such an art standard for public funding should be set, that is indeed a difficult question, but I do not believe it to be outside the realm of possibility.  I do not think that most Americans would want their tax dollars to go toward the purchase of elephant poop to smear on the mother icon of America's most prominent religion.