Bill Barrette, a New York artist, has a hobby: collecting knick-knacks and objets d'art made by Japanese prisoners in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo after World War II

* Bill Barrette, a New York artist, has a hobby: collecting knick-knacks and objets d'art made by Japanese prisoners in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo after World War II. There are pencil drawings; a cigarette case woven from strips of toilet paper; a picture frame made of rolled-up pages of Life magazine and rice paste.

"This is an example of how art and history might benefit from each other," Barrette says. His collection "deals with issues like the politics of memory--who gets to tell the story and how." Fine--so long as we retain our memory of the fact that the prisoners in Sugamo were accused war criminals. Some of them, like Hideki Tojo, plotted Japan's aggressions and were executed for it; others abused American and Australian prisoners of war; others treated Japan's Chinese and Korean subjects like animals. These days the subtext of Abu Ghraib runs under Barrette's project like bad plumbing in an old house. In Artsy-Fartsy World, it is enough to be imprisoned by Americans, no matter where, no matter for what, to establish one's moral and aesthetic bona fides.

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