Censorship has always played an integral role in cultural norms, extremes, and taboos. In the world of contemporary art censorship almost always carries a negative connotation as it seems its objective is to stifle the aims and objectives of novel creativity in order to confine art to standards that society wishes to uphold. Naturally, well since the advent of contemporary, this goes against the fundamental principles art itself. Breaking free of these restrictions is the exact reason why artists inspire movement, people yearn to express themselves freely and when not permitted to do so, eventually movements occur. But what people tend to not to realize is that this oppressive censorship sometimes works in favor of an artist, art style, or art work by accidentally perpetuating its image and disseminating its existence to the entirety of whatever society is being censored. There is no better example of such a phenomenon than in Richard Meyers’ “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art.” The essay exposes the story of Republican Senator Jesse Helms in his attempt to censor art works, specifically “homo-erotic” depictions epitomized by artist Mapplethorpe who himself was a homosexual that created incredible and radical photographs representing homo-sexuality in frequently erotic poses. Helms moved to thoroughly censor these “indecent” photographic depictions of men and their penises or men in erotic poses with each other from the American people. In the process of trying to move for legislation to censor such images/art Helms did things such as photocopy and distribute photographs like Mapplethorpe’s Embrace (1982) or Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 ½) to congress. In his public discussions of such things, Helms constantly broached the subject and described the image, at one point comparing it to his own “righteous” art collection at his home as being outlandishly inappropriate when juxtaposed to his own art work. But with each description and mentioning and re-distribution of this homo-eroticism, he was inadvertently bringing it to light and casting its presence to the world. This completely countered his own censor-aimed intentions and actually just purveyed the art work as the artist, Mapplethorpe, would have tried to do if he were not deceased. This fabulous paradox explains the relationship between art and censorship and how they can intertwine across different purposes to actually end up incidentally benefitting one or the other.