Art vs. Porn

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acockey

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When for you does nudity in art become porn?

I ask this because trolling around Deviant art you'll see a lot of artists who pose their models in a "porn-esque" manner, also just a picture of a woman's boobs to me is porn unless the composition is different

Does it matter to that whether boobs are drawn or not to whether it is porn?
 

fireluxlou

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Umm I don't really consider my breasts to be porn. Just boobs.
 

Maryn

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If I can tell the work is intended to titillate (pun fully intended), that makes it not entirely art, in my eyes. No matter what the artists claims.

Maryn, leaning back to await more thoughtful responses
 

wilde is on my side

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I think it depends on the context. I mean, if you argue that then a lot of classic/renaissance art would be considered porn. Also, it depends on the way the model is displayed, I mean if she was bending over naked etc i think that could be considered pornographic. But i think some art with naked models is beautiful, tasteful and the artist would say it's a celebration of human form.

Sorry if i rambled, it's something i tend to do :)
 

kuwisdelu

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I don't see why art can't titillate.

I don't really there as being a line between art and porn.

But there's plenty of porn that fails to be art.

(As well as art that fails to be porn.)
 

veinglory

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They can be both, or neither. IMHO unless there is a clear 'invitation to insert' or similar you can't really be sure it is meant as masturbatory material.
 
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acockey

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Interesting Points

@Wilde is on my side: I don't think I have seen a Renaissance Paint where a woman has both legs in a "V" formation, with a come here look
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Drawn, photographed, or computer-generated, breasts are breasts.

Because of various laws and statutes, and because this forum has underage members, we don't allow any nudity in public images. That's not to say it is or isn't porn, just that dealing with the legal aspects gets ugly.

Personally, I think the definition of porn is inadequate. There are things that are or are not to my taste, but I have seen too many things classified as porn that ought not to be to care for the term.

A very diverse lot of things get labeled generally as porn which are probably better separated and looked at distinctly: good art, bad art, history painting, nudes, erotica, photographs, comics, pin-ups, violence against women fantasies, offensive images, ridiculously unrealistic caricatures, ugly distortions, loving tributes, and a myriad of other arts and styles.

I think "porn" is a catch-all label which is less than useful. A better way to approach imagery is "who finds this offensive, and why?"
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Interesting Points

@Wilde is on my side: I don't think I have seen a Renaissance Paint where a woman has both legs in a "V" formation, with a come here look

There are plenty of those paintings from the eighteenth century. Many of our modern ideas of the erotic derive from the Enlightenment.

The thing is, in the Renaissance what was considered erotic was different from now. Tastes in titillation change -- they are but fashion -- and believe it or not, current erotic imagery is not universal.

In the Renaissance simply having nudity was consided erotic, as in the many paintings of Venus. If she was lying on a lush soft fur, even more so. Titian's Venus has a massive "come hither" look, and there's a sixteenth-century portrait of two unclad sisters, I can't recall where, where one is tweaking the other's nipple.

Every time and place has its own different encoding of what is considered erotic. Perhaps in a century our splayed, oiled, tanned, heavily made-up women with rictus grins will look as baffling as late Victorian postcards with demure swimming women in striped catsuits with gargantuan bottoms and atrophied legs look to us today.
 

kuwisdelu

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If Joyce's Ulysses can be called pornographic, being pornographic can't be all that bad.

I hope to one day be called pornographic, too.

Extra points if I make it past a Court of Appeals case! Supremes, or no'in'!
 

acockey

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I retract my former state standing corrected and offer this instead

In aforeposted veinglory picture link I think there is a subtleness that a lot of today's art is missing

again being general ^^^ sorry
 

Alessandra Kelley

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If I can tell the work is intended to titillate (pun fully intended), that makes it not entirely art, in my eyes. No matter what the artists claims.

Maryn, leaning back to await more thoughtful responses

I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree.

It is entirely human to be attracted to beauty, and the nature of our species is that some of the beauty we are attracted to is sexual in nature.

To declare art as less than art because it is meant in part or in whole to excite a sexual response removes an entire foundational facet of the human experience from the realm of possibility.

Art can powerfully touch our deepest feelings and desires to show us things we might never have thought of. It must be able to call upon the entire spectrum of human experience.

to put it another way, would you consider art as less than art if it was made in whole or in part to horrify?
 

fireluxlou

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I used to really enjoy life drawing class because of the varied naked people you'd draw. Kind of miss free drawing like that. :/

Art is subjective and different to many people. So is what is porn really. I don't consider a naked body to be porn.
 

kuwisdelu

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I retract my former state standing corrected and offer this instead

In aforeposted veinglory picture link I think there is a subtleness that a lot of today's art is missing

again being general ^^^ sorry

What kind of subtleness?

There are lots of ways of be subtle. I don't think contemporary art is any less subtle, but it can often be subtle in different ways.
 

mccardey

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Personally, I think the definition of porn is inadequate.

Didn't John Mortimer (of Rumpole of the Bailey fame) once clear that up for us?

A test of pornography was once adumbrated by the Supreme Court of the United States. It was called the Felix Principle. And it was adumbrated in the days when Mr Justice Frankfurter sat upon the court - a pornographic book was defined as something which gave Mr Justice Frankfurter an erection.

It was noticed that as the years went by and Mr Justice Frankfurter became older and less easily stimulated, the judgements of the Supreme Court became conspicuously more liberal.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I retract my former state standing corrected and offer this instead

In aforeposted veinglory picture link I think there is a subtleness that a lot of today's art is missing

again being general ^^^ sorry

What kind of subtleness?

There are lots of ways of be subtle. I don't think contemporary art is any less subtle, but it can often be subtle in different ways.

There's also that the less subtle historical stuff tends to vanish in occasional fits of puritanical purging. Or tends to be so crude it's not depicted in the art histories.

I've seen Roman graffiti as unsubtle as anything today, also German Renaissance woodcuts, etc. etc.

Tastes today are no cruder nor more refined than in the past.
 

mccardey

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There's also that the less subtle historical stuff tends to vanish in occasional fits of puritanical purging. Or tends to be so crude it's not depicted in the art histories.

I've seen Roman graffiti as unsubtle as anything today, also German Renaissance woodcuts, etc. etc.

Tastes today are no cruder nor more refined than in the past.

There's some fairly graphic art on the ceilings of little lost churches in Italy. Lots of religio-sado-eroticism posing as Lives of The Blessed Saints. Unnerving - and frankly I suspect anatomically all but impossible, but there you go -- it serves as a Warning...
 

acockey

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I guess I steered us in the wrong direction here... I was more voiceing <---Ernest Hemingway spelling) my frustration at logging into DA and seeing gratuitous booby just for the sake of booby, and you can't tell me all those users are doing it for the "art" of the female form
 

Ken

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_ _ _ if a gallery is willing to display stuff and connoisseurs are willing to purchase it then the question as to whether it's art or not becomes irrelevant. For all intents and purposes it is.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I guess I steered us in the wrong direction here... I was more voiceing <---Ernest Hemingway spelling) my frustration at logging into DA and seeing gratuitous booby just for the sake of booby, and you can't tell me all those users are doing it for the "art" of the female form

Well no, they're not.

But is that a problem? I mean this as a serious question.
 

Tepelus

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I understand what you're talking about, acockey. Back when I could actually get on DA (it disrupts my internet connection for some reason) I remember seeing a lot of nude photos and art that I thought was gratuitous. You can tell when an artist or photographer is going for art or to just show off body parts and call it art. Same with some of the drawings. This here is what I consider nude done tastefully as art. Of course, the photos were done by a professional photographer and model (and a yummy one at that). Some of the stuff I've seen on DA looks like they are trying to achieve or have achieved nude as art tastefully, others either failed or like said, just posting gratuitous stuff just for the sake of it. I suppose though, it's all subjective.
 

fireluxlou

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I understand what you're talking about, acockey. Back when I could actually get on DA (it disrupts my internet connection for some reason) I remember seeing a lot of nude photos and art that I thought was gratuitous. You can tell when an artist or photographer is going for art or to just show off body parts and call it art. Same with some of the drawings. This here is what I consider nude done tastefully as art. Of course, the photos were done by a professional photographer and model (and a yummy one at that). Some of the stuff I've seen on DA looks like they are trying to achieve or have achieved nude as art tastefully, others either failed or like said, just posting gratuitous stuff just for the sake of it. I suppose though, it's all subjective.

I remember years back on DA people would get up in arms over any nude photography or any nude painting, drawing etc getting daily deviations and people would report them (they were like the examples you have shown) hence the current reporting system. All I can say about that site at that time it was very sexually repressed.
 

Tepelus

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If the nudity bothers someone, I believe DA has a filter that makes it so you don't have to see it. I choose to keep it off because there is some nice nude art on there. You just have to wade through the rest.
 

fireluxlou

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If the nudity bothers someone, I believe DA has a filter that makes it so you don't have to see it. I choose to keep it off because there is some nice nude art on there. You just have to wade through the rest.

Yea there is but this wasn't automatically on at the time. I mean it's automatically on for under 18s now. Still didn't stop users complaining about it though even though the filters existed at that time.
 
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