punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents," said then-Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.
That 1989 decision (reaffirmed last year when the court struck down a new federal law making it a crime to bum or deface the American flag) was "the end result of a cultural revolution" that began in the mid- 1950s, according to Boime, an art histo- rian at the University of California at Los Angeles. Jasper Johns fired the revolu- tion's...