It all started with MEATJOY.

Dressed in a black polo and all-american blue jeans, Marvin Taylor looks like your average 49-year-old man. But his studded belt and single ear piercing reflect the rebel inside.

Marvin Taylor is the director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. Last Thursday, he was visiting the "Downtown Pix" exhibition at NYU’s Grey Gallery.

The exhibit opened Jan. 11, and showcased over 300 photographs and printed materials from the nation's leading collection of downtown New York art, circa 1960s and beyond.

He paused to show visitors a video of Carolee Schneemann's "Meat Joy," a performance art piece in which nearly naked men and women performed sexual acts with raw meat. Taylor explained how this era of downtown New York's scene made this performance, graffiti and portraits of punk rockers legitimate forms of art.

"If it doesn't offend someone, its not art," explained Taylor, on the penultimate day of the collection's exhibit at NYU's Grey Art Gallery.

And Taylor is willing to push the envelope on that point. While chatting about ways he’d like to expand the collection, he mentioned two pieces he’d love to obtain: S&M photos by the genre's darling, Robert Maplethorpe, and "The Interior Scroll," a feminist manifesto Schneemann read after removing it from her vagina for every performance.

Marvin attributed his taste for the inherently rebellious punk culture to his Quaker upbringing in Cottage Grove, Indiana--population, 109. The "cultural criticism" of the Quakers and their history of activism laid the framework for Taylor's positive reception to works of the punk era.

By the time Taylor made it to New York in 1987, the scene was vanishing. Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll had taken out some of the scene's key performers, and the AIDS epidemic was decimating those that were left behind.

In the East Village, drug money was being invested in art to facilitate white-collar money laundering. Art collectors and investors ignored the controversial videos, memorabilia and photographs that now sell for thousands of dollars.

More than 600 miles away from the epicenter of the American punk scene, Taylor spent punk's formative years working in libraries and studying music at the University of Indiana.

In New York, he continued working as a librarian. His critical and rebellious eye proved perfect for seeing the value of works that now makeup the Fales downtown New York collection.

In effect, Taylor has preserved an era he only fully experienced in its demise. But he betrays no regrets about being a latecomer to the scene.

"Nostalgia is the death of everything," he said. "The death of criticism, the death of creativity."