Art and Porn (brief notes)

- Art and Porn
I felt it was time that someone addressed this issue. Pornography is becoming more accessible, more popular. Of course, this is largely due to the Internet and it is gradually having a knock on effect on culture, off line. I believe it is important to distinguish between reality (off line) and on line experience, which is hypereal beyond the extent of the hypereality that we experience in every day life, off line.

Ultimately the Internet will cease to amaze us so much and will become like the car, telephone and television. Important, but part of every day life and, at times rather dull. Bearing this in mind, porn is used by more people than ever. I find the idea of a complete virtual experience of porn, perhaps leading to quasi-spiritual experience via computer interfaces naive, shallow and laughable. Maybe, the most important concern surrounding porn at the moment is in art and photography. When does art become porn?

My opinion is that porn is art. People that create porn use all the skills of film production/direction, photography and photo editing that accepted film makers and photographers/digital artists use. Conceptually, porn equates with other art forms, in the sense that it is an attempt to communicate human experience and elicit a response in the viewer/audience. It could be argued that porn only attempts to arouse sexual feelings in its audience, at the expense of other mental experience. However, I am not won over by this argument. Whereas art can be a cerebral experience, eliciting all manner of emotional, cognitive and spiritual phenomena in viewers, art can also be purely decorative or it may attempt to say something simple and one-dimensional. It seems to me that the current debate over art and porn can only be answered by ourselves. Are we prepared to accept media that conveys sexual content purely for the purposes of arousing sexual feelings in the viewer, as art? This argument is not really about art, it is about our attitudes towards emotions.