Sprinkled among the Saturday throng at the Monet exhibit at the N.C. Museum of Art were a number of children, including one little guy bent on convincing his mother that you can lead a kid to the great creek of culture, but you can't make him drink.

As he fidgeted, whined and tugged at his mother's dress trail, wailing, "Let's go home!" my wife, a gregarious sort, knelt by him and asked, "Do you know the story about Little Boy Blue, who couldn't come blow his horn when the sheep were in the meadows and the cows in the corn because Little Boy Blue was behind the haystack fast asleep?"

The little fellow nodded yes, he knew the story, whereupon my wife said, "Well, on that wall over there is a painting of a big haystack that you might want to see." The grateful mother thanked the Good Samaritan as she and the boy headed for the haystack. I hate to think what might have ensued when he discovered that Boy Blue wasn't snoozing behind the haystack.

If Monet were a movie, it would not even be rated PG-13, as opposed to counterpart Michelangelo, whose preoccupation with the human form -- often in the nude -- has earned him an X-rating in the minds of many.

In fact, earlier this autumn, this newspaper came in for some chiding when it warned on Page One that some readers might find the "nudity" on the front of the Life, etc., section offensive. The photo in question was Michelangelo's famed "Creation of Adam," which pictures Adam's penis in repose.

The day the photo ran, I polled five friends, all women and younger than I, to see if they found the art offensive. All five did, in varying degrees. So, even in our sexually oriented culture, a lot of people still have a problem separating art from pornography.

On a trip to Rome and the Sistine Chapel some years ago, I suffered a painful crick in the neck from gawking so long at the 500-year-old masterpiece on the chapel ceiling. Yet Adam's "nudity" never registered with me.

Michelangelo was a true genius, as well as a glutton for punishment, having spent almost four years standing on a scaffold craning his neck to apply paint to the ceiling's several frescoes.

His gigantic sculpture of David in Florence, Italy, must surely be the world's most photographed piece of art. College buddy Dick Byrd, who, along with his wife, had joined us on the trip, posed with me in front of the 12-foot-high sculpture while my wife snapped our picture. Alas, the developed film showed only my and Dick's head, but included all of David's pubic area.

Lest you attribute this to some kind of Freudian hang-up, I hasten to add that her photo of me standing by the Lion of Lucerne, Switzerland's national icon, was very good of the lion, but pictured me only from the knees down.

I've never thought of David as being pornographic. I did think it incongruent, however, for a soldier to be going into battle stark naked. A bit of research set me straight on that. According to Biblical scholars, King Saul had outfitted David in his own armor, but the young man, a practical fellow, discarded it in the interest of accuracy and agility. Armed only with a slingshot and a small stone, he went forth to take on Goliath.

One of my first assignments at The Raleigh Times was to cover the brouhaha over the state art museum's purchase of a nude statue of the mythological Hercules. Upon hearing that Hercules was in the raw, droves of people, including many who had never been closer to art than the Bull Durham smoking-tobacco ads plastered on the sides of rural barns, flocked in for a lascivious look. The outcry was so great that museum officials were obliged to fashion a makeshift fig leaf of lead to cover Hercules' modest appendage.

During a recent chat with museum curator David Steele, I asked if Hercules is still with us. He is, but minus both the fig leaf -- which the curator said was once rumored to have actually been a tobacco leaf -- and the appendage, which was broken off during the museum's move from downtown to its present location.

So go enjoy Monet's uncensored serenity, his tranquil gardens, seascapes and lily ponds. If you take the kids, save the haystack until the little tyrants have become cantankerous and are clamoring to go home or to McDonald's for a Big Mac.