WASHINGTON, DC — "Art for art’s sake" is one of those declarations that never gets much traction in the nation’s capital. Sure, the District of Columbia has some of the best art museums in the country, but Washington’s cultural essence is steeped in the overtly political uses and misuses of art.

After all, in recent decades Washington has seen many of the fiercest battles over government funding of the arts — including jousts over obscenity and censorship. The streets of the capital are filled with statues of military heroes and politicians. Even a goofy attempt to bring art to the streets last year — the "Party Animals" project — had artists painting GOP elephants and Democratic donkeys, which were then displayed on sidewalks and street corners.

The "Party Animals" project, with its kitschy colors, was a decidedly lowbrow way of getting the denizens of the nation’s capital to "think about art." Now, the provocative and controversial "Illegal Art" exhibit — opening in Washington after previous runs in New York and Chicago — is giving those in the corridors and back alleys of power an opportunity for more serious meditation on art, politics, and commerce. After all, it was the federal government that cast much of this art into an "illegal" — or at least a "gray" — area when it passed radical copyright reforms in 1998. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (passed as a tribute to the TV-and-recording-star-turned-congressman who died in a 1998 skiing accident) was a sweeping victory for corporate America. It not only extended copyright protections for pre-1978 corporate works to almost 100 years, it also retroactively applied such extensions. Works copyrighted after 1923 — such as Disney’s Mickey Mouse (created in 1928 and due to expire in 2003) were extended for another 20 years. (Boston gets a glimpse of the video portion of the exhibit at a special screening on Sunday, May 18 at River Gods in Cambridge.)

"Illegal Art" focuses on a wide range of art — including visual and graphic art, music, and video — that has run afoul of laws governing intellectual property. As the introduction to the exhibit notes starkly, "The laws governing ‘intellectual property’ have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork — as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in the 1940s — will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hip-hop, and Pop Art might never have existed."

The practical implications of the Bono Act, with its copyright hammerlock, become dramatically clear in "Illegal Art." Modern art has often made the culture itself a subject for portrayal and comment, and that is precisely what the artists featured in this exhibit do. When you wander through the collection (or browse the show’s contents at www.illegal-art.org), you’ll find a wide array of familiar and seemingly innocuous faces, sounds, and images — Fred Flintstone, Barbie, the riff from AC/DC’s "Back in Black," and footage from ABC News. The radical extension of copyright law casts these ubiquitous cultural icons in a much different light — and has already allowed those who hold the rights to Fred and Barbie to bludgeon or suppress artists who dare to appropriate them.

Indeed, many of the works on display raise the chilling specter of silencing artists. Works involving characters such as Goofy and Mickey Mouse that have been withdrawn from galleries. Artists sued for copyright infringement — or forced to make their work entirely inaccessible to audiences. Videos nixed by film-festival lawyers afraid of lawsuits from corporations. On the musical front, the exhibit shines a spotlight on songs cut from albums by the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy because of samples — and on an entire album by British group the JAMs, which has been deleted and destroyed.

"We thought it was important to bring the exhibit to DC," says Carrie McLaren, the curator of "Illegal Art" and editor and publisher of Stay Free magazine — a publication that serves as an ebullient watchdog of corporate and media culture. Since much of the law governing trademark and copyright is debated and passed in the nation’s capital, bringing "Illegal Art" to Washington might enliven dialogue about the wrongs inflicted on artists in the name of copyright.

As subversive as some of the works in "Illegal Art" may appear (check out Diana Thorneycroft’s graphite portrait of Barney Rubble with a head wound, or Tom Forsythe’s photographs of Barbie dolls posed in blenders and a martini glass), McLaren argues that many of the artists "were not ever thinking about these issues when they were [producing art]. They were working with what’s symbolic culturally."

This is particularly true in many of the earliest pieces in the show, which dabble in parody and comment. Drawings such as Wally Wood’s 1967 melding of Disney characters with the painting of Hieronymous Bosch (Disneyland Memorial Orgy) or the cover art of the Residents’ 1974 Meet the Residents (which parodies the Beatles’ first LP, Meet the Beatles) are engaged in a sort of playful malice that twists the familiar coziness of culture inside out. Though such works stretch the notion of "fair use" provisions of copyright law (which allow third parties to use copyrighted material for purposes that include "criticism" and "comment"), they don’t break it.

Yet much of the more recent work in "Illegal Art" — especially that which has appeared since the 1998 copyright revisions and the 1991 battle royal between the rock group U2 and sonic subversives Negativland over the latter group’s "U2" single — is more consciously transgressive. It does more than bend "fair use"; rather, it attacks the shackles copyright law places on artists who dip into the Zeitgeist to find sources for their work.

In many ways, the Negativland controversy — detailed in their book, Fair Use — was the opening shot in the new war over copyright. The "U2" single was a collage made up of a bizarre and profane rant by America’s Top 40 host Casey Kasem, underscored by a sample of U2’s "I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For" — and it might have escaped notice, except for its packaging. The cover of the Negativland single foregrounded the "letter U" and the "numeral 2" in huge letters, using the distinctive typeface cribbed from the Irish band’s War LP. Island Records, which was U2’s label at that time, literally litigated the Negativland release into oblivion — and also created a firestorm of controversy about the concept of "fair use" and sampling.

Filmmaker Phil Patiris — whose work is featured in the video portion of the show — argues that much of the problem may be in the overwhelming corporatization of the culture. The law, he argues, just reflects it. "Well, one has to keep in mind the evolution since the 1950s and 1960s in marketing and branding strategy," he writes in response to e-mailed questions, "where, for one thing, trademark symbolism has become ever more important, not merely identification but psycho-religious and thus sacrosanct, so we are supposed to believe like good little demographic units. You yourself just used the word ‘transgressing,’ yes? But it isn’t that, it just seems so, such is the indoctrination and fear of corporate authority. So the symbology carries more weight as a target than it did fifty years ago, I think."

What the "Illegal Art" exhibit demonstrates clearly is that some of the most perceptive art of our time is beginning to collide with corporate power inscribed in law — and, thus, with politics. The introduction to the exhibit explicitly links this collision with the book burnings and labeling of art as "degenerate" in Nazi Germany. It’s an apt comparison. Whether a work of art is burned or removed from a gallery by politicians, or destroyed because it runs afoul of a corporate-copyright watchdog wielding lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters, the result is the same. It disappears.