Feb 18 2009
Clubbing Seals In A Zoo
On a forum for erotic art enthusiasts the following question was asked: What is your definition of “erotic art” and what separates it from porn?
It is a real yawner. As curator of AMEA I have been asked questions like this hundreds of times since 1996. Still, I woke up way too early in the morning and decided to have a go at posting an answer.
I am also posting it here for my own archive:
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I would say erotic art in a sense is a ghetto, a walled territory, created by artists themselves to have platforms where they can easily show art that is rejected by those who claim to own the better half of morality.
In fact there is no such thing as erotic art. There is bad art and there is good art. It gets even more interesting when people start to describe themselves as “erotic artists”. Are those artists erotic or their works? Mostly neither. Are they artists? Well sometimes… Again, it all depends on the quality of their works.
A painter who paints landscapes and does the occasional portrait or nude, will rarely describe himself as a landscape painter. He will call himself an artist and his self chosen label will be accepted or rejected based on the impact of his works on others. If his works are crap, he will end up being addressed as a would be artist, unless we start to think differently about his works in decades to come.
Having said that and having denied erotic art the status of an art on its own, the distinction between porn and art becomes clearer, almost self explanatory. Still there is a lot of good pornography in art and a lot of good art in pornography. Again it is a moral issue. Artists who work from the depths of their souls as a rule do not have the least bit of interest for morality, unless of course their only goal is to make money. My personal experience tells me that I have better use for mediocre pornography than lousy art.
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I had to do this, although it felt like clubbing seals in a Zoo.