Busty Women

Give real pornography credit for some things- It doesn’t take itself quite so murderously seriously, does a better job of sex scenes, and usually doesn’t pretend to be “art”. If only art would take the hint. Art is big business, and sadly the mentality of Wall Street has penetrated the art market. There’s more actual design art in most sex toys than the stylised pabulum passing itself off as art.

The movie industry started the stampede to the bottom with “art films” in which liver conditions disguised as production and scripts were called “art”. The new “art films” however, were never art or anything like it. There’s more artistic expression in a can of beans than in some of those films. If you’ve seen Andy Warhol’s Trash, that’s an art film. If you’ve seen any of the American and Euro “adult themes” movies, that’s dreck, and pretty grim dreck at that.

The art films must have made a fortune for bed manufacturers, but really just managed to be soft, low quality porn. Visual art was next, with what can only be called oppressive “sexuality” in various forms. Something like Piss Christ, which many artists have labelled a waste of urine and a cheap shot at religion for the sake of making money, could be considered obscene, spiritual pornography.

The shock factor in art and porn

The art market, which is comprised of a healthy gathering of art dealers and art experts, all of whom are prepared to put high dollar values on anything, is the arbiter of art. Obscenity may be in the mind of the beholder able to find immorality in anyone else anywhere from a painting to a love swing, but in the business sense it’s in the pockets of a sort of investment cartel, creating new products to sell to the gullible.

To shock is to sell. That’s the reality of upmarket art, and if people don’t get Minimalism, post modernism, and can’t tell the difference between a Gauguin and something that wouldn’t get much more than a wince from anyone who can read at a Crayola exhibit, so much the better for business. Porn sometimes tries to shock, but it stays out of the truly tedious zones on principle. Good porn gets interest, not because it’s porn, but because it does its job properly.

It’s a pretty sorry situation. Porn isn’t art, doesn’t particularly try to be art, but occasionally is. Porn usually doesn’t try to shock, either, mainly because it’s redundant. The unexpected is more effective than the shock factor. Art isn’t porn, supposedly by definition, but the products of some types art aren’t even good porn, merely shocking on principle.

There’s an irony here for artists and art lovers. The truly great artists of the past didn’t really have this problem. Chagall and Manet managed to have whole careers without the shock factor defining their art, with some exceptions, which were really demands for artistic freedom in those times. That’s how old the “shock” factor in modern art really is. It’s a geriatric cultural concept, kept alive by illiterates and spruikers. The good news is that art fads always die out. The pity is that art is trying so hard to be lousy porn.