Much confusion in this piece. First, art and porn. No, art is not “porn adjacent”. Neither the Rokeby Venus nor the David of Michelangelo are there to provoke arousal and generally they do not. In the first place they are not “aroused” themselves; in the second, they adopt postures of dignity and / or modesty which repel such a response – like habitual nudists, they “wear” their nudity like a suit of clothes. In the third place, being works of art, the eye of the beholder flickers between the phenomenon represented and the stony or painterly fact of the representation, marvelling at the dignified splendours of the first as revealed by the artistic genius of the second. This is the great pleasure of art, the strange double register of that dash of white paint as a gleam of love in a human eye. Finally, on this point, the nude thus conceived is in fact the antidote to porn, because it evokes a detached, disinterested, appreciative and above all charitable sense of our humanity. We see beauty – beauty that must die, as Keats says, and mingled with our admiration is pity for our common lot. This explains the equally established academic tradition of the elderly nude – the St Jerome, for instance. Yes, as Lord Clark says, the nude has a sensual aspect but – again – sensual, not sexual; erotic, perhaps, but at a distance. The whole relationship between this detached, compassionate, pitying, disinterested even tragic notion of human beauty and the deeper impulses of desire to which it relates is explored – as people will recall – in “Death in Venice”. But those who claim that the old artist is simply a predator in pursuit of “ass” expose the sorry paucity of their experience and imagination – qualities which are equally on show among the shrill harpies of the left and the cynical fools of the “adult” entertainment industry.
However, you must admit, surely, that *without* the ass things would look pretty bleak? And whyever would you believe that “postures of dignity and/or modesty” must always repel arousal? I honestly think it might be you who is demonstrating shortcomings in the imaginative department, and covering them up with rather pompous language?
Well, next time I find somebody fumbling with his trousers at the National Gallery, I’ll know it’s you.
Fredrick Urbanelli
2 years ago
I generally appreciate Ms. Harrington’s essays, but she’s gone a bit off into fantasyland here, I’m afraid. She just seems to be hammering away rather absent-mindedly at one of her favorite preoccupations (porn) and attempting to establish very dubious connections to….what, in fact? The article is a real mess, Mary. It needs serious cleaning up and a bit of coherent thought. An art historian you are most certainly not.
Sorry but WTF is “agency”? I know it’s the left’s new word, but what does it mean that an existing word doesn’t already mean?
And nothing to say about thousands of years of male nudes?
Agency is a temporally embedded process that encompasses three different constitutive elements: iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation … don’t you know?
It’s that property that the left deny that their favoured identity groups have in order to excuse their poor choices. It’s always someone else’s fault – someone white, male, Western civilisation etc.
Very nice essay, Mary, and thanks for cutting the “tragically suborned art historian” some slack.
And, yes. Leaving /something/ to the imagination does restore, rather than dissipate, something of the erotic charge.
Stephen Rose
2 years ago
Interesting article, and I find myself engaged with both commentators. The pornhub thing reminds me more of “tableau vivant” or the sort of sex shows you had to go to Copenhagen in the sixties to see. Both might use the established image of a classical painting /sculpture but with none of the transformative nature of creativity. The divine, is common to great art, abstract or figurative.
If I may talk about making, there is an assumption that figurative art is all direct observation, many of the great artists, worked from a meagre drawing, latterly photographs , cast or another painting. The availability of models, due to socialital prohibition, was limited to workmen and/or prostitutes. Many male bodies provide the model for female figures.
So the images often come from the inner eye.
The idea of pure objectivity in image making, seems impossible outside of passport photos or facial recognition technology. The subjective is always present,like in current political philosophy.
It is that conforming to the subject, then detaching, then engaging again that might truly be seen as erotic. A dance if you will. I paint very few nudes, but if they happen it is after several clothed portraits, when trust and friendship has been established. Sometimes it is even at the request of the sitter. The nude, as pointed out in the comments doesn’t exist purely for arousal, but to embody civic virtue or piety or wisdom. These distinctions have been lost, as has the possibility of the eroticism of human feeling.
Andrew Roman
2 years ago
I get it. Art = good nudes and Porn = bad nudes. What makes Porn bad is that it is in bad taste while Art is in good taste. And the distinction between the two lies in the groin of the beholder.
Perhaps the time is long past when we should stop using the word “Porn” as it is just a vacuous synonym for bad erotica that the writer doesn’t like and believes that others shouldn’t like either.
the shallowness of youth is perfectly displayed in your post, you just do not get it, do you? Nor do your up voters.
Satyam Nagwekar
2 years ago
While Mary has some good perspectives, I have observed that her articles are often alarmist in nature. The proclamation that “The dividing line between art and porn is blurring” is a bit preposterous. The headline, as usual, is the all too familiar ‘humanity-defining I told you so’ fare that got me shaking my head before reading the piece.
Peter Branagan
2 years ago
OMG this article is indescribably boring. Snuzzzzzzzzzzz
the article and most of the replies take away any pleasurable thought i might have had!!
Don Lightband
2 years ago
What Mary says about the multifarious relations between thrill & transgression etc is of course ‘right on the money’, if you’ll .pardon the expression, but i don’t think she fully realizes just *how* right she is. For if we consider the great formless interdiction that lies from day one over everything humanity does and can ever do, and by which humanity is really defined, then I’m not so sure she’d be so worried about boundaries being lost and eroticism along with them. For the biggest, most fundamental boundary is that created by necessary rivalry between the founding and inevitably fragile communally *centered* scene, and the consequently now intimate, ‘private’ scene. IOW, human sexual activity is erotic precisely to the degree it is tied to, that it entails, *representation*. The power or thrill of transgression can only come subsequent to that. IOW, pornography of any description is as dependent on the existence of the sacred&significant as anything else one might care to name. The one-to-many, *scenic* configuration prevails even in the very midst of the most intimate one-on-one.. Mary’s apparent hope for the return of barely glimpsed, suggested vaginal lips etc does not even come close to appreciating the power.of the human sacred to generate fresh significance at every steo..
I always enjoy Mary’s thoughtful and beautifully written articles, but I’m struggling to discern a coherent argument in this rather confusing hotpotch of tenuous analogies and art-historical reflections.
Can’t we just agree that most 2nd wave feminists hate pornography with a vengeance, and probably not without good reason?
PS: I’m delighted that UnHerd has so many excellent female writers, but they do seem to confine themselves to ostenstibly feminist issues.
Last edited 2 years ago by Eddie Johnson
Julie Kemp
2 years ago
Great essay Mary. Totally agree with all the nuance – re borders and crossing the line into degradation of the ‘fine’. I come back to the proliferation of sexing out as just another display of easy profanity and misplaced savvy re transcending (= high release) rather than release/climax (= slumber.) Eve knew this! That’s why she gave the ‘apple’ to ‘Adam’.
Don Lightband
2 years ago
There’s no other word for it. The reaction to what i initially wrote here is downright deplorable. It’s like you chaps are so firmly and smugly wedged up what you suppose to be yr own aesthetic wazoos you cannot even conceive of the anthropological! Whence any and all of this prepossession by sexual scenicity might have actually come, and how we may most cleanly and minimally theorize that. A particularly vexatious little pox on all of your houses, say i
Much confusion in this piece. First, art and porn. No, art is not “porn adjacent”. Neither the Rokeby Venus nor the David of Michelangelo are there to provoke arousal and generally they do not. In the first place they are not “aroused” themselves; in the second, they adopt postures of dignity and / or modesty which repel such a response – like habitual nudists, they “wear” their nudity like a suit of clothes. In the third place, being works of art, the eye of the beholder flickers between the phenomenon represented and the stony or painterly fact of the representation, marvelling at the dignified splendours of the first as revealed by the artistic genius of the second. This is the great pleasure of art, the strange double register of that dash of white paint as a gleam of love in a human eye. Finally, on this point, the nude thus conceived is in fact the antidote to porn, because it evokes a detached, disinterested, appreciative and above all charitable sense of our humanity. We see beauty – beauty that must die, as Keats says, and mingled with our admiration is pity for our common lot. This explains the equally established academic tradition of the elderly nude – the St Jerome, for instance. Yes, as Lord Clark says, the nude has a sensual aspect but – again – sensual, not sexual; erotic, perhaps, but at a distance. The whole relationship between this detached, compassionate, pitying, disinterested even tragic notion of human beauty and the deeper impulses of desire to which it relates is explored – as people will recall – in “Death in Venice”. But those who claim that the old artist is simply a predator in pursuit of “ass” expose the sorry paucity of their experience and imagination – qualities which are equally on show among the shrill harpies of the left and the cynical fools of the “adult” entertainment industry.
However, you must admit, surely, that *without* the ass things would look pretty bleak? And whyever would you believe that “postures of dignity and/or modesty” must always repel arousal? I honestly think it might be you who is demonstrating shortcomings in the imaginative department, and covering them up with rather pompous language?
Well, next time I find somebody fumbling with his trousers at the National Gallery, I’ll know it’s you.
I generally appreciate Ms. Harrington’s essays, but she’s gone a bit off into fantasyland here, I’m afraid. She just seems to be hammering away rather absent-mindedly at one of her favorite preoccupations (porn) and attempting to establish very dubious connections to….what, in fact? The article is a real mess, Mary. It needs serious cleaning up and a bit of coherent thought. An art historian you are most certainly not.
I am sorry I don’t follow the article at all
Sorry but WTF is “agency”? I know it’s the left’s new word, but what does it mean that an existing word doesn’t already mean?
And nothing to say about thousands of years of male nudes?
Agency is a temporally embedded process that encompasses three different constitutive elements: iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation … don’t you know?
But David Lammy uses the word agency and he’s far too thick to understand it if that’s what it means.
It’s that property that the left deny that their favoured identity groups have in order to excuse their poor choices. It’s always someone else’s fault – someone white, male, Western civilisation etc.
Basically, the bigotry of low expectations.
It’s linked to social capital.
Very nice essay, Mary, and thanks for cutting the “tragically suborned art historian” some slack.
And, yes. Leaving /something/ to the imagination does restore, rather than dissipate, something of the erotic charge.
Interesting article, and I find myself engaged with both commentators. The pornhub thing reminds me more of “tableau vivant” or the sort of sex shows you had to go to Copenhagen in the sixties to see. Both might use the established image of a classical painting /sculpture but with none of the transformative nature of creativity. The divine, is common to great art, abstract or figurative.
If I may talk about making, there is an assumption that figurative art is all direct observation, many of the great artists, worked from a meagre drawing, latterly photographs , cast or another painting. The availability of models, due to socialital prohibition, was limited to workmen and/or prostitutes. Many male bodies provide the model for female figures.
So the images often come from the inner eye.
The idea of pure objectivity in image making, seems impossible outside of passport photos or facial recognition technology. The subjective is always present,like in current political philosophy.
It is that conforming to the subject, then detaching, then engaging again that might truly be seen as erotic. A dance if you will. I paint very few nudes, but if they happen it is after several clothed portraits, when trust and friendship has been established. Sometimes it is even at the request of the sitter. The nude, as pointed out in the comments doesn’t exist purely for arousal, but to embody civic virtue or piety or wisdom. These distinctions have been lost, as has the possibility of the eroticism of human feeling.
I get it. Art = good nudes and Porn = bad nudes. What makes Porn bad is that it is in bad taste while Art is in good taste. And the distinction between the two lies in the groin of the beholder.
Perhaps the time is long past when we should stop using the word “Porn” as it is just a vacuous synonym for bad erotica that the writer doesn’t like and believes that others shouldn’t like either.
the shallowness of youth is perfectly displayed in your post, you just do not get it, do you? Nor do your up voters.
While Mary has some good perspectives, I have observed that her articles are often alarmist in nature. The proclamation that “The dividing line between art and porn is blurring” is a bit preposterous. The headline, as usual, is the all too familiar ‘humanity-defining I told you so’ fare that got me shaking my head before reading the piece.
OMG this article is indescribably boring. Snuzzzzzzzzzzz
the article and most of the replies take away any pleasurable thought i might have had!!
What Mary says about the multifarious relations between thrill & transgression etc is of course ‘right on the money’, if you’ll .pardon the expression, but i don’t think she fully realizes just *how* right she is. For if we consider the great formless interdiction that lies from day one over everything humanity does and can ever do, and by which humanity is really defined, then I’m not so sure she’d be so worried about boundaries being lost and eroticism along with them. For the biggest, most fundamental boundary is that created by necessary rivalry between the founding and inevitably fragile communally *centered* scene, and the consequently now intimate, ‘private’ scene. IOW, human sexual activity is erotic precisely to the degree it is tied to, that it entails, *representation*. The power or thrill of transgression can only come subsequent to that. IOW, pornography of any description is as dependent on the existence of the sacred&significant as anything else one might care to name. The one-to-many, *scenic* configuration prevails even in the very midst of the most intimate one-on-one.. Mary’s apparent hope for the return of barely glimpsed, suggested vaginal lips etc does not even come close to appreciating the power.of the human sacred to generate fresh significance at every steo..
Rather “pompous language”, wouldn’t you say?
Not at all, Kamarad! I’ve tried to say something very big and basic as minimally and without fuss as i can
Then you’ve failed.
In what way? Please try to be constructive if you possibly can
What?
I always enjoy Mary’s thoughtful and beautifully written articles, but I’m struggling to discern a coherent argument in this rather confusing hotpotch of tenuous analogies and art-historical reflections.
Can’t we just agree that most 2nd wave feminists hate pornography with a vengeance, and probably not without good reason?
PS: I’m delighted that UnHerd has so many excellent female writers, but they do seem to confine themselves to ostenstibly feminist issues.
Great essay Mary. Totally agree with all the nuance – re borders and crossing the line into degradation of the ‘fine’. I come back to the proliferation of sexing out as just another display of easy profanity and misplaced savvy re transcending (= high release) rather than release/climax (= slumber.) Eve knew this! That’s why she gave the ‘apple’ to ‘Adam’.
There’s no other word for it. The reaction to what i initially wrote here is downright deplorable. It’s like you chaps are so firmly and smugly wedged up what you suppose to be yr own aesthetic wazoos you cannot even conceive of the anthropological! Whence any and all of this prepossession by sexual scenicity might have actually come, and how we may most cleanly and minimally theorize that. A particularly vexatious little pox on all of your houses, say i
Hey – not on my house, I hope. I’ll give you an upvote. I thought you made a valid point – not the whole story, but a valid point.