Visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts, the grande dame of museums here, could visit a room in the modern gallery to see a toy Jesus wearing a condom, a pile of human excrement and a brazil nut labeled with a racial epithet. For two days.

But the one-room exhibition, containing 15 provocative pieces, was shuttered on Friday after its brief run because of concerns that it would offend the community, and the local artist whose work now stands behind closed doors has accused the museum of censorship after-the-fact.

The museum's director disagrees. ''The museum is always selecting works of art, and selection is not censorship,'' said Graham W. J. Beal, who joined the museum two months ago. ''Asking an artist to exclude one work in favor of another is not censorship.''

The artist saw it differently. ''The exhibit was already up and running. That's when it became an issue of censorship. If they had come to me before the opening we wouldn't be talking now. It would be as if I painted a picture of a nude and they said once it was on view, 'Now we think it might offend some people; why don't you paint a dress on it,' '' said Jef Bourgeau, who runs a nonprofit museum in nearby Pontiac. ''The show examined push-your-button art. It is aggressive art, but for better or worse it is the art of the nineties.''

But Mr. Beal saw it more as a question of choosing his battles.

''We have to be the ones comfortable with the position we are taking, and not just say, well, the artist demands it so we are going to put it in the show,'' said Mr. Beal, who likened the situation to that of an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, ''Sensation,'' that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani recently tried unsuccessfully to shut down. ''The museum and art become a political and moral football kicked around by all sorts of people,'' Mr. Beal said.

The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized the decision to close the exhibition, called ''Van Gogh's Ear,'' which opened Wednesday and was to have run through Sunday.

''The essence of modern art in general is to allow people to make up their own mind about art,'' said Kary L. Moss, executive director of the Michigan branch of the A.C.L.U.

Mr. Bourgeau's exhibition was commissioned two years ago, and he had worked with a museum curator in planning it. But the new museum director had not been aware of what the exhibition would contain before it opened, said a museum spokeswoman, Annmarie Erickson.

It was meant to explore how artists are intertwined with the art they create, particularly in the context of artists who had gained celebrity and notoriety in the 1990's, Mr. Bourgeau said.

One item on display is a jar of urine, labeled as that used in Andres Serrano's photograph of a submerged cross. ''It was supposed to be the actual urine used, but it wasn't,'' Mr. Bourgeau said. "It was more about the labels, about context than the work on view."

Similarly, there is a video that purports to be the work of British artist Tracey Emin, showing her taking a shower while menstruating. But another naked woman is on the screen. And the Jesus with a condom is attributed to Chris Ofili, the artist whose ''Holy Virgin Mary'' painting is adorned with elephant dung at the Brooklyn museum. Despite the label, it is meant to be taken as the pretend response of Mr. Ofili to the controversy created by his work.

''Some people understood what was going on and laughed and some people weren't aware of the layering,'' Mr. Bourgeau said. "But both went away satisfied that they had interacted with the art of the nineties in some way." And so in a post-modern spectacle of its own, art pretending to be that of controversial artists of the past has become controversial itself.

Mr. Beal, who said he turned down the ''Sensation'' exhibit while director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said that it was sometimes appropriate for museums to show art likely to offend, but that it was not warranted in this case.

''They were afraid somebody might be offended -- but nobody ever was,'' said Mr. Bourgeau, who said few people had seen the exhibit before the doors were padlocked. ''I find that amazing and a sign of the times. We've got this huge controversy over work that no one's ever seen.''