"Looking for a nightclub experience that isn't the same old, same old? Nite Moves is an upscale juice bar featuring all the amenities you'd expect from a luxury bar — plus a few surprises."

So says the narrator in an online promo for the Latham, New York-based adult dancing club that features pole- and couch-dancing, as well as a selection of delicious non-alcoholic beverages. But now a court has decided that Nite Moves is indeed "same old, same old." The owners of the club had audaciously been seeking to argue that erotic dances counted as "dramatic or musical arts performances," thereby qualifying for a tax exemption. A Tribunal had rejected that claim, and now the appellate division of the state supreme court has upheld that rejection.

This means that Nite Moves must pay up on a $125,000 tax bill dating back to 2005 — though the club is appealing the ruling. "This is a free speech issue," the club's lawyer W. Andrew McCullough told the New York Post. "The state doesn't get to be dance critic." For its part, the court decision — viewable online — dismisses Nite Moves's first amendment claims, saying that the law is not discriminating against the club because of its erotic nature: nothing, the court says, would "preclude an adult juice bar from qualifying for the claimed exemptions under a different set of circumstances."

But what circumstances? In fact, the whole matter comes down to the age-old question of "what is art?" To distinguish erotic dancing from, say, ballet, the court finds that real art requires you to go to school. "The record reflects that the club's dancers are not required to have any formal dance training and, in lieu thereof, often rely upon videos or suggestions from other dancers to learn their craft," reads the decision. In other words, stripping — or at least, the stripping that goes down at Nite Moves — doesn't count as art because anyone can do it. (Tell that to user CCRiderm, who writes of a visit to Nite Moves on the Ultimate Strip Club List Web site, "Only one girl shouldn't have been there and really that was just because she didn't know how to dance.")

The court reserves special disdain for Nite Moves's unnamed expert witness, a cultural anthropologist who defined "choreography" broadly as "the composition and arrangement of dances." After visiting the club, interviewing dancers, and watching the Nite Moves DVD, the expert "testified at length regarding the sequential components, aesthetics and principles of exotic dance and, in her report, set forth the choreographic sequence and characteristics of the on-stage dances she viewed on the foregoing DVD."

The court, however, rejected all this as flimflam, upholding the Tribunal's earlier pronouncement on the expert's testimony: "the Tribunal characterized the expert's interpretation of a choreographed performance as 'stunningly sweeping' — deeming it to be 'so broad as to include almost any planned movements [performed to] canned music.'" The Tribunal added that the expert admitted that she hadn't actually seen any of the private dances. Consequently, it blasted the academic for her a priori certainty "in the absence of direct knowledge or observation of what occurs in the private areas of Nite Moves."

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In general, the mystery of what goes on in the private areas of Nite Moves, and whether it is sophisticated enough to qualify as "choreography," seems to have been the rock on which the club's tax exemption claims ran aground. "None of the DVDs entered into evidence at the administrative hearing depicted the private dances in question, and neither the generalized testimony — as offered by one of the club's dancers — that the private performances 'still use[d] dance moves' nor that dancer's description of a particular move she often would employ while performing such a dance was sufficient to establish that these private performances were in fact choreographed."

In the end, the legal implications of the decision are clear: yes, exotic dancing can count as art — but only if the dancers' "particular moves" are something they picked up in college.