The United States Supreme Court may not know what is art, it may be a bit fuzzy on what is indecent, but it has an admirably clear notion of what doesn’t constitute censorship. And that includes withholding the taxpayers’ money from chocolate-coated nudists.

The most surprising thing about the high court’s decision this week in the case of Karen Finley v. the National Endowment for the Arts is that it took the high court to make this decision. The 1990 law requiring the NEA to consider decency, as well as artistic merit, in the awarding of grants was struck down by a series of lower courts that, curiously, saw in “decency” an unacceptably subjective vagueness they did not see in “artistic merit.”

Karen Finley is a practitioner of performance art, that melding of disciplines some see as the very cutting edge, others as the epitome of the “jack of all trades, master of none” syndrome. Her particular schtick is to fulminate graphically and at length on all matters sexual, capped off by stripping down, smearing her naked body with Hershey’s finest and denouncing man’s inhumanity to woman. Brava.

Congress inserted the decency clause into the NEA’s mandate in response to public outrage over a small number of high-profile grants, particularly the photography exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpe’s whip-and-chain homoerotica and Andres Serrano’s crucifix submerged in urine. Finley and three other regular feeders at the taxpayers’ trough sued, claiming the clause amounted to censorship and violated their First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

Nonsense, the court said by an 8 to 1 vote. The decency clause only directs the NEA to consider general standards of decency and respect; it does not directly preclude certain categories of speech. Besides, the very nature of arts funding, like scholarships and research grants, always has required a considerable amount of content-based judgment on such matters as excellence and value.

But the most important aspect of the court’s ruling is this: Freedom of speech is too precious and censorship too offensive to be trivialized. Censorship is when people speaking their minds get hauled off to jail, it’s when printing presses get padlocked, it’s when microphones get unplugged. It’s not when somebody doesn’t get a grant.

This ruling is most welcome news at the NEA, which, due largely to the uncanny way a few bad decisions can outweigh thousands of good ones, has seen its budget — $175 million just a few years ago — slashed by nearly half and for three years running has barely survived congressional attempts to eliminate it entirely. It’s also good news for the majority of Americans who support funding the arts but who expect something worthwhile in return.

Even Ms. Finley has reason to buck up. She still, now without having to cater to the government thought police, is free to vent and fume before any audience willing to pay the price of admission. However, given the court’s decision and the soaring price of butterfat, she may want to express herself in a medium more appropriate to her circumstances. Bologna, perhaps.