If you want to defend the first claim, that any doodle, any streetsign, any political poster, any train timetable, any health & safety training film, any road map is art because "someone made it for someone else to look at", you stretch the term 'art' so wide it loses any meaning and any claim you might want to make that porn is art is rendered already empty.
The second claim, that porn is a form of expression and thus art, at least keeps the meaning of 'art' within manageable boundaries and so is more theoretically defensible than the first claim, but it clashes with the reality of porn that we see about us. Porn-making demands the suppression of personal expression in preference for the pursuit of the current fad, fetish or gimmick. Porn relentlessly copies porn. Any successful porn title will unleash countless (usually inferior) imitations. Porn mostly expresses nothing, beyond itself. Perhaps some of the very best porn does pass muster as expressive art, but the economic practicalities of the porn business mean that that is rare indeed. Certainly we cannot say that all porn is art.
a news crew will set up a camera and stage an interview. with lighting and a vague script. there will be dialogue. it will be edited. and it will be aired on television.
do you consider that art?
on one hand, you can say that it's a very mild type of art, but, then, on the other hand, you then do what john thomas said, you stretch the meaning of art to the point where any kind of creation is art.
and, really, it's not elitist art snobbery for there to be minimum criteria for it to be considered art. otherwise, the term has no meaning. or maybe it does, but it's just been overhyped.
I'm hearing lots of definitions here like "art is what I say is art" or "art is what some authority says is art."
As a definition, that really has no value, as it is totally subjective. Bad art exists. Boring art exists. It doesn't need your approval to be art. My mass-produced car has more art in it than many paintings.
Kindergarten drawings, news stories, heads on coins, porn videos - it's all art.
I'm having difficulty seeing how this differs from the art world. People we traditionally consider as artists are no less likely to pursue the current fad than porners are.
Furthermore, we have numerous genres within traditional art - Realism, Impressionism, Modernism, etc. We have these genres because a good many artists' works are similar enough to be considered as a group. However, I don't think most people would consider Degas, Cézanne, Monet, et al, as being hacks for working within a particular genre. Neither do I think that those painters would agree that their personal expression was suppressed.
In other words, there is plenty of room for creativity and individuality within the porn genres, just as there is within the genres of traditional art. Sure, hacks will abound, but that's no different than the traditional art fields, either.
Art is art. People like to slice it and dice it and make it a hierarchy and pooh-pooh what they don't like, but ultimately if it comes from the hand of Man, it's art.
All the rest is just jewelry.
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conquistador Deactivated User
Hellhamster. 2947 Posts 10/03
Posted - May 6 2007 : 6:18PM
The great thinker Gibby Haynes once said: "The only thing I know about art is that it's the last three letter in fart."
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AlexPanzer Deactivated User
1593 Posts 6/03
Posted - May 6 2007 : 6:20PM
I think that porn can only be art when it is done by trully passionate poeple that love what they do and put their work before money.
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good. 2268 Posts 1/05
Posted - May 7 2007 : 5:04PM
Great porn, for me, is erotic. What is erotic is of course a very personal judgment. In my view, what is erotic can very well be art.
Now if you think that a scene featuring a girl having her head stuffed into a toilet bowel, while she is assaulted anally, resulting in an excrement coated penis, is erotic, then I say to each his/her own.
But porn that is shot in such away that every scene is the same, its just the performers who change, is not art in my book.
