Art or Porn

[cere]

Well, for my twopenneth...

Porn and art appeal to different senses, it would seem to me at least.  Art is about feeling but not about stimulating sexual urges.  I do confess to thinking, however, that some of the Saturn Devouring Venus type images show a skill level in their creation but a deviant mindset...that tends to lean towards porn in my book.

Having said that I appreciate both. 

:-)

[Morven]

For me, the two are not two ends of a continuum, but completely different things.  Something can be both art and porn; it can be neither; or it can be one and not the other.  Different axes with little relation.

[Kotah]

I would think all the original pictures to be art, all the duplicates to be a craft.

Therefore, kinnda like morven said, they are all both to me.

[KyoZero]

I tried the ratepornorart.com

pretty much all looked like art to me

-Kyo

[Nabeshin]

I think it's really a game of black and white semantics in a universe of grey area, and it all comes down to personal definitions and the social mores of your culture. Art and porn are subjective words that could be used to describe damn near anything.

The bigger questions to me are, to what extent do we let an individual or group's definition of what is offensive and what is artistic determine how accessible the content is to the rest of their society? Do we leave it open, have no limits to what is publicly and openly available and force parents and the morally squeamish to self sensor? Or are there solid boundaries that we should all agree a person should have to be old enough and actively seek out to be exposed to?

Also, Bill Hicks had a fun bit about this: Pornography - Bill Hicks

[Nabeshin]

Oh wow, I didn't expect that. Sorry folks, I didn't intend to stick that big window there...

Kudos to whoever programmed the forum to automatically embed youtube links, though. I've never seen that happen before.

[BCdan]

It depends on art style.  The current cutting edge modern art may share some qualities with porn. 

I am willing to bet that if you made a Baroque piece with a hardcore sex scene, people would call it art.  The cutting edge always gets judged a bit harder and often times this leads to referring to something as pornographic as a means of insulting the work.

[Farmboy]

Porn elicits sex. Art may express desire, but porn creates it. Porn is an end in itself, but art seeks something beyond itself. So we are talking about the artists' intent. If I only want to turn you on, or turn myself on with what I am writing, it's porn. If I intend to explore the multitude of human experiences, clearly I would not exclude sex, but that would only be a part of what I was doing. Porn seeks to create a marketable product out of sex. A painting that has nudity is not considered porn if it is one-of-a-kind because it can only have one buyer. But if your intention is to create something that someone would take off to a secret place so he can masturbate, then it's not art. Which isn't to say it becomes porn when someone does that. Boris may draw an awesome Deeja Thoris, but even if someone takes his book into the bathroom, it isn't porn because he did it as a book cover, and because nobody wears clothing in Barsoom.

[Lucinda]

I totally agree with Aislin. I think people are too hung up on the content without considering the intent. Of course the problem being that the intent isn't always obvious. A painting of a haywain is obviously indended to be art. A naked girl being graphically taken by two men is almost certainly intended to be porn. If you take that as the black and white then its just a question of how grey things get in the mind of the viewer after that. Thats possibly a touch simplistic because I'd have to put porn into a subset of art too, like many other folks have said. It might be extreme but I think even the most hard core film can be termed art on some level. Its no less valid than half a cow or an unmade bed. So maybe its true to say that there is no black, just very dark grey.

[Whoami]

It's really one of those irregular verbs, such as "I'm clear thinking, you're of strong opinions,  he's bigoted"; "I like art, you like erotica, he likes porn"!
Ultimately it's in the eye of the beholder.

[Talia]

I believe all art is conceptual regardless of content. It is how the eye and mind perceives the work. I have watched some porn that really didn't excite me at all. Well the dialogue didn't help either, but I have seen some pictures with vague nudity that did. It is what evokes the mind that evokes the body to respond. Each persons eye will always perceive something different when seeing or watching any form of art or porn.