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Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching
Do we really know pornography when we see it? Pornography is condemned for being "too close" whilst erotica is defended as "leaving room for the imagination." And the art of the nude is treated as something much more special, located even further away from the potential of arousal.
Art/Porn argues that these distinctions are based on an age-old antithesis between sight and touch, an antithesis created and maintained for centuries by art criticism. Art has always elicited a struggle between the senses, between something to be viewed and something to be touched, between visual and visceral pleasure.
Images compel the senses in ways that are both taboo and intrinsic to art. Contemporary responses to images of the nude embody this longstanding tension. Our fears about the materiality of art when in close proximity to our own bodies exist alongside a regulation of sensory response which dates back to Antiquity.
Art/Porn reveals how - from fondling statues in Antiquity to point-and-click Internet pornography - the worlds of art and pornography are much closer than we think.
Art/Porn argues that these distinctions are based on an age-old antithesis between sight and touch, an antithesis created and maintained for centuries by art criticism. Art has always elicited a struggle between the senses, between something to be viewed and something to be touched, between visual and visceral pleasure.
Images compel the senses in ways that are both taboo and intrinsic to art. Contemporary responses to images of the nude embody this longstanding tension. Our fears about the materiality of art when in close proximity to our own bodies exist alongside a regulation of sensory response which dates back to Antiquity.
Art/Porn reveals how - from fondling statues in Antiquity to point-and-click Internet pornography - the worlds of art and pornography are much closer than we think.
264 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 4, 2009
We don't live in a world of sex, we live in a sexualized society.
We don't have erotic art, we have sex fed through science: endless divisions of type and name and preference.
Porn as we know it came about in the 19th century, as a way for the upper classes to protect their smut as "art" and distinguish it from the smut of the lumpen proles, most of which, it should be noted, was photographed. Photography changed everything.
I dunno, read it. Very soon. It's shorter than you think.
We don't have erotic art, we have sex fed through science: endless divisions of type and name and preference.
Porn as we know it came about in the 19th century, as a way for the upper classes to protect their smut as "art" and distinguish it from the smut of the lumpen proles, most of which, it should be noted, was photographed. Photography changed everything.
I dunno, read it. Very soon. It's shorter than you think.
December 21, 2015
An interesting text that explores the artificial ontological gap between what is art and what is pornography. It does suffer from not being the most accessible of texts if one is not familiar with other books examining pornography.
It also suffers in the sense that if one reads Plato without presumption, it becomes clear that Plato was not afraid of mimesis, but that his condemnation of other poets as related to the ideal city was to prevent contamination or the spread of competing narratives.
It also suffers in the sense that if one reads Plato without presumption, it becomes clear that Plato was not afraid of mimesis, but that his condemnation of other poets as related to the ideal city was to prevent contamination or the spread of competing narratives.
July 16, 2019
Chronicles the history of bare images with text and B/w images. Insightful.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews