Is Porn Art?

Before I even try to dig into this question, let me provide you with the answer that I know I’ll be coming up with at the end: I don’t know.

Now that I’ve taken the mystery out of it, let me start thinking about the topic. (No, of COURSE I didn’t think about it ahead of time! As usual I’m going to just start typing and see what happens.)

I was trying to think of things to write about for the blog and one of the partially formed ideas floating around in my head was the fact that sometimes when I’m surfing porn I come across pictures or videos that just blow me away. There are lots of sexy pictures, obviously, that’s why I spend so much time looking at them, but sometimes there are ones that are just… so much more. They don’t always, literally, take my breath away, but sometimes the combination of the perfect girl (with the perfect body), wearing the perfect outfit (or not), being captured by the perfect camera at the perfect angle in the perfect lighting… sometimes it all just comes together in a sublime way that touches me more than porn usually does.

But the question before us is: Does that make it art? When I see an especially moving picture or video, is it because that picture is art, or is it just because it’s so extremely pornographic that I’m hit with a stronger dose of lust than usual? What does “pornographic” mean, anyway? For that matter, what does “art” mean?

It’s probably obvious to anyone that the mere presence or absence of nudity isn’t the deciding factor when figuring out whether something is art or pornography. The nude human body has been a constant subject matter for artists for as long as art has existed. You can’t walk into a museum without seeing sculptures or paintings of nude women. (Maybe in the Deep South you can; they’re funny about things down there, so they might not have nudes hanging in their museums.)

So it is a valid question to ask the difference between this:

Venus of Urbino

and this:

A girl with nice boobs

The thing is, even though it’s a valid question, I think most of us would say the first is art and the second is porn. Even if some (such as those aforementioned Deep South folks) would find the first one kind of smutty, and even if many of us would find the second one pretty softcore, we’d probably still put the painting in the category of art and the photo in the category of porn. (I’m talking about pure categorization, not which one you like better.) And I’d argue that many of the people who wouldn’t categorize them in that way would be doing so to prove a point, not because they really think the first one is not art and/or the second one is.

I’m sure there are some characteristics of art that are fulfilled by porn, so I don’t wholly disagree with those who claim that yes, porn is art. I especially don’t disagree with those who claim that some porn is art – though I’d be hard pressed to come up with criteria to determine when it is and when it isn’t.

I think the problem with this whole question is that it gets into subjectivity. One man’s art (Venus of Urbino) is another man’s porn (uptight Southerner getting a chubby from Venus of Urbino).

The good news, for me, is that it doesn’t really matter whether porn is art or not. I consume porn because I enjoy it, and enjoy masturbating to it. (If you haven’t tried it you should.) Whether it’s art or not is neither here nor there.