Governor Spitzer’s dramatic downfall provided rich fodder for journalists, late-night television hosts, and the punsters responsible for tabloid headlines. Now it has also become material for art.

The performance artist Karen Finley — who is no stranger to controversy herself, having been denied a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1990 on the basis of decency concerns, and later having posed for Playboy in nothing but a viscous coating of chocolate — is using the Spitzer scandal as the basis for a new work, which she will preview next month as part of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association at New York University, where Ms. Finley teaches.

(For those who have been living under a rock for the last two months, a federal investigation uncovered that Mr. Spitzer was a regular client of an escort service called the Emperors Club VIP.)

The piece, to be called “Impulse to Suck: The performance of the apology and the separation between sex and state,” will contrast Mr. Spitzer’s public apology, issued on March 10, with Ms. Finley’s reconstructions of what might have happened behind the scenes between Mr. Spitzer and his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, and between Mr. Spitzer and the escort, Ashley Dupré.

In a recent interview, Ms. Finley said that the scandal played into the public’s need to turn politicians into tragic archetypes. Mr. Spitzer, she said, is the protagonist dogged by his shadow self, which after being long-repressed finally comes to light. Meanwhile, Ms. Wall and Ms. Dupré represent the poles of a society-wide mother/whore complex. Ms. Wall’s clearly pained presence at her husband’s side during his apology was an instance of “this female masochism that is so needed by our culture — to see that pain and suffering,” Ms. Finley said.

Ms. Finley said she was troubled by our need for female public figures to be sexless. Asked if she thought Ms. Spitzer should not have stood by her husband during his apology, Ms. Finley paused and then said, somewhat incongruously: “I think Silda should have been allowed to take belly dancing!”

Although her plans for the piece were still preliminary, Ms. Finley showed a reporter some sketches and paintings she had made, focusing on visual images that stood out from the news coverage, such as the blue jacket Ms. Spitzer wore during the apology (which, Ms. Finley pointed out, recalled the blue suit worn by Dina Matos McGreevey when her husband, James McGreevey, resigned as New Jersey governor) and Mr. Spitzer’s socks, which Ms. Dupré said he left on during sex.

“You immediately get this smell,” Ms. Finley said, referring to the socks. “Have you ever been with a guy who’s kept his socks on?”

Sitting in her office at NYU, which was lined with books about feminism, art, and freedom of the press, Ms. Finley seemed a long way from her own days as political firestarter. In 1990, she became a target after the columnists Robert Novak and Rowland Evans criticized her for performances in which she smeared her nude body with chocolate to represent the degradation of women. The NEA subsequently denied grants to her and three other artists, on the basis that their works were indecent. The grants were ultimately reinstated, but a case that Ms. Finley and the other artists brought challenging the “decency” test was defeated in 1998 before the Supreme Court.

In a 2000 memoir, “A Different Kind of Intimacy,” Ms. Finley described the controversy as extremely stressful. But she also chose to embrace the cartoon image her enemies had created of her, doing a show called “The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman” and posing for Playboy.

Today, Ms. Finley is less concerned with prudish politicians than with our culture’s need to work out its sexual and familial conflicts in the lives of its leaders.

“I think that we vote for them because [of] their complexes,” Ms. Finley said. “Clinton, we voted for him because his biological father died and he was the son of an alcoholic.” Part of the public’s attraction to President Bush was that “he was never good enough, he was never as smart as [his] father, and his addiction — I think that’s what people were voting for.”

Ms. Finley supports Senator Obama for president. While being critical of our society’s demand that women suffer publicly for their husbands’ sins, she faulted Senator Clinton for not having grown through her marital pain. “Gore benefited” from his defeat and political exile, she said. “He really made this a soul journey. I don’t find that from her.”

While much remained to be determined about the Spitzer piece — including whether she would be the sole performer, or whether there would be several actors to play the different roles — she already had a plan about where she’d like to take it after the first performance at NYU. “I’d like to do an Empire Tour: Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Long Island,” she said.