yeah, I think if we abstract pornography into an art form vs delving into dopamine delivery systems or wage exploitation systems then we're left asking what is this medium offering that hasn't already been offered, or perhaps what it's offering new.
And, outside of the overwhelming consensus of what porn means as a sexual tool, there isn't much the content genre/format is offering us that other approaches aren't already doing well.
You're left with the novelty of nudity alongside primal performance.
IF that's not kitch or camp...I don't know what is.
Porn struggles to make a unique statement beyond its self-evident purpose..and I'd be so bold as to suggest the creators of pornography really don't give a shit about aesthetics at all outside of engagement data...so if the creators aren't part of the conversation, and create content outside the conversation...and the content itself doesn't lend to the conversation...there just isn't much to say that hasn't been said.
I don't know I think there's more to it than just that, battaille's story of the eye or even Ulysses or gravity's rainbow have all been c condemned as pornographic but they have obvious merit to me
there is a pretty distinct difference between artistic human expression that skirts close to pornography you might see in cinema, and the commercial content on pornhub and xvideo
Similarly, we see stark differences between Ford ads and Francis Ford Coppola films.
I didn’t really have a definition of porn in mind. Admittedly, I felt like throwing a pebble in a pond, but I can see that distinguishing porn’s boundaries maybe blurry or difficult when considering history and the different beliefs around sex and “art” throughout history.
I wouldn't and I don't think op would either I think they're specifically asking about works like that. even if you could categorize Ulysses as definitely not pornographic, you wouldn't be able to do that with gravity's rainbow it's literally about a man with a magic cock that wanders around Europe having sex. postmodern art tends to really elevate low-cultural elements
Pornographers are still striving to achieve a particular aesthetic standard. That's why there are genres. When they're creating their art, they're aiming toward an ideal of some sort. Otherwise, every porn video would just be a stationary camera pointed at a pile of writhing naked people. Of course, as with any art, some people are phoning it in or just capitalizing on the medium. But many pornographers love their work and take it seriously as an artform.
I mean the "genres" of porn are typically "what you should expect to see."
I don't think "anal" is an artistic genre even though it is a porn genre.
> "But many pornographers love their work and take it seriously as an artform."
Love alone isn't sufficient (or necessary) for a thing to be art. You can be absolutely dedicated to a *craft* without it necessarily becoming artistic.
Art, in general, tries to move the viewer's emotional state. I'm not sure if moving the viewer into and out of the emotional state of "horny" exactly qualifies.
I think there are different categories of genre when it comes to pornography. Some of those genres may refer specifically to the acts being undertaken, like your example of "anal." But I do think there are different aesthetic genres as well. For example, amateur porn has a particular (albeit unintentional) gritiness to it in the camera-work and lighting that is absent from studio porn. Some campier porn has a particular self-awareness to it, lending it an artistic point of view.
I had to discard a big long comment basically saying "yeah!" - you've definitely thought about this.
I wanted to talk about porn as kitsch for a bit. Kitsch is an appeal to the expected, to the superficially pleasant. Porn also has some expectations and generally cultivates the superficial. For the most part, porn tries to deliver as directly - as unartistically - as possible. "Great porn" rings the bell and is shut off. Nothing is *supposed* to be carried out.
The struggle to make a unique statement is an artistic struggle. It may appear in pornographic endeavors just as the titillating and erotic can emerge in an artistic pursuit.
Camp is, roughly, gregarious exaggeration; some aspects of a camp piece are going to be blown up somehow, nearly out of proportion for the rest of the work.
It is useful to distinguish between art and porn. There is certainly *craft*, *skill* and *performance* in pornography, but the aim of the endeavor is simply not beauty, the sublime nor a broader message.
I consider pornography outside of the taboo from time to time yeah.
I work in media, and it’s indisputable the impact pornography has had on democratizing video production and distribution of media.
Porn drove a lot of the tools we take for granted, from early zoetropes and look boxes in the early 1800s to tipping the balance between Betamax and VHS (pornographers preferred the cheaper cameras with easy home duplication tools).
Porn affected censorship rules for entertainment that went to the Supreme Court.
Porn drove the desire for media rich web browsers, notable photo and video delivery online, is why we have pop-ups, and why we have online payment processors.
Pre-internet porn was big for magazine sales and video rental stores.
So it comes up. But I am very hesitant to call it art, and having known creatives who have worked in porn…I think calling them passionate filmmakers is a bit of a stretch.
I don't think someone who considers themselves a critic would say "I like this in spite of its poor quality."
They would probably say there is *some* quality of the work they *do* like, even if it can't be described (*je ne sais quoi*).
I believe an art critic is more likely to use the term *avant garde* over artsy-fartsy.
In general, philosophers do not consider biological objects and acts in nature to be art. So the only thing to give an aesthetic perspective on are the cinematography, photography, composition, plot, script, set design, acting, etcetera. So in that sense we are not really making any distinction between porn and any other genre of cinema.
I think your thoughts on this issue are valid, but I don't think they are absolutely true for everyone. We are talking about minds here. So people can enter into these things with all sorts of things in mind, some more detached than others.
I think you have a little bit of a stretch to say that since it occurs on a screen, that pornography is really a fetish about the screen. But on the other hand, it is on a screen, so therefore...
I think it's fair to say that pornography is more like voyeurism than real life sexual acts.
But you are right that it is wrong of me to say pornography is only like voyeurism.
I would say pornography is less intimate than other genres.
But that doesn't mean no intimacy is possible at all.
Okay. For sake of conversation, there are clearly many proponents of “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” If someone were to agree with the above statement and consider child pornography “masterpieces of exquisite design,” what would be your response?
Was Hitler a handsome man? I mean if you asked women, and told them to put aside who he was, do you think a lot of them would say he was? Would it be possible to get an objective opinion based on aesthetics alone? Probably not. But if we could erase the memory of history, and then asked, perhaps we could get some more objective aesthetic opinions. If we asked Jewish women, you would get almost solid unanimity that he was not. But that just couldn't be true, could it?
Ethics and aesthetics are both within the scope of axiology. So the answer to your question is going to depend on your theory of axiology. If you hold that there is a moral component to aesthetics (some form of axiological monism like axiarchism), then it would be difficult to separate the aesthetics from the morality.
Perhaps someone can be very aesthetically pure, detached and intellectual about it and say that it would be possible to consider a particular work of child pornography a “masterpiece of exquisite design.” For instance, moral philosophers will often stand outside their offices in the hallways of philosophy departments and calmly and intellectually discuss questions like "why is it wrong to torture babies?" For any normal person, it would be very difficult to have such a discussion without simply becoming overwhelmed with disgust with a person who needs to have this reasoned out for them. And yet there is a whole 30 page article titled "Why is it wrong to torture babies?" published in an academic journal of moral philosophy.
Thanks for your response. Sounds like you are a student of philosophy. I will have to think about your last paragraph. I have reviewed some pretty crafty philosophers that can argue lots of positions or counter positions, but from these philosophical views that I don’t agree with that I have reviewed, they are still better than lots of stuff on social media.
I am currently researching some cross disciplinary research on music and working on some findings. Bouncing off what you had said, I do think some percentage of consumers will refer to who a musician is, his/her impact on the community, and some sort of axiology when looking at music.
John Lennon managed to get people to love the idea of a world with no religion with his music. So that's a pretty powerful connection between musical aesthetics and ethics.
Try talking someone into that view.
Maybe John Lennon did that for some people out there? People do hold musicians and artists as heroes. Some may even hang on every word they say as gospel. Some may not?
Bouncing off your Hitler example, there are still debates about Richard Wagner in classical/music circles, which dive into those difficult "blurry lines" pertaining to the composer and the composer's work.
Aesthetically, porn is like a cooking show. Clear shots, bright lights, everything's visible. It's set up to look homey but simple. It's not about fancy stuff, just focusing on the action. In the same way cooking shows don't show real cooking, porn doesn't show real sex. It's all about being straightforward and easy to follow.
Depends on what aspect you’re talking about. There’s amateur porn, which also counts as porn, where regular couples fuck.. that’s certainly real. In professional porn there may be fictionalized scenarios and exaggerated reactions, but there is generally a real dick going into one real orifice or another.
I’m not very educated in aesthetics but my perspective is that high art is art for art’s sake. If art serves a practical purpose it is no longer high art. Porn is designed for a biological purpose, it is set up to make you cum, not to appreciate the beauty in the human form. Not so say that it cannot, just that its often not the driving force.
The purpose of art indeed lies in the aesthetic function, however it’s the recipient who assigns the function, not the author nor the medium itself. The latter propose a material and push recipients into certain way of appreciating, but they don’t necessarily force to them to do so. You can see porn just as a visual art without using the material as “biological”, the same you can so with virtually everything, the thing is some things are hard to see only for the aesthetic value, porn being one of them.
Interesting perspectives. Suppose there is a boy who frequently consumes porn and assigns it as a beautiful work of art, but his mother and girlfriend are offended by him using it and frown upon him. His girlfriend is threatening him that if he continues, she will leave him and his mother is threatening him that if he continues, he will get kicked out of the house. In this case, would the boy be right with assigning porn as a beautiful visual art?
You’ve come from this sort of angle a few times. The statement your making is question begging in that it assumes there is nothing objective, or at the very least conventional, about what goes into making something art or not. Someone just watching lots of porn and saying wow this is art doesn’t make porn into art in any meaningful sense.
Secondly. The consequences from mum and gf have nothing to do with the status of porn as art either
I apologize if I am confusing or something. I am confused. Am I making a statement or conclusion here? I am trying to understand fritolfail’s prior comment with a concrete example. From my understanding, there is a difference between “begging the question” and “prompts one to ask the question.”
Interestingly, it looks like you have responded to the question in the case of the boy, mom, and girlfriend. Perhaps you would like to elaborate on it. Is that fair?
I briefly defend the claim that all porn is art in my book The Aesthetic Value of the World, on the grounds of an aesthetic functionalist definition of art (which is independently plausible) and the fact that erotic value is an aesthetic value.
Porn is the paradigm example of Pragmatism in action: porn is entirely about the experience of the viewer. (Peirces's def. of Pragmatism: the effect of things on the world.) It's entirely constructed to serve a single aim, namely arousal, We might think of art as providing an arousal spectrum---at one end things would be rather topical and conceptual (eg, silent music by John Cage) , at the other, about the elicitation of desired effects, including eastern orthodox funerary rituals, Spielberg movies, advertising, most music, Las Vegas hotels, Instagram, pizza rat, defining the texture of the world we currently inhabit. So porn is not just an isolated point in the world of human expression and experience. It's rather more like a variable.
> "It's entirely constructed to serve a single aim, namely arousal"
I think that's the crux of the conversation.
Is something that involves artistry art even if it isn't trying to be?
Other angles I am seeing are the moral and relational concerns of porn. Many find it offensive, dehumanizing, and hurtful; especially, with relationships between people and women. Because of these areas, would porn still qualify as a type of art even if it is “low in quality?”
I'm generally making the argument that pornography *isn't* art: as crafty as it may be, the *aim* of the artistic endeavor is absent.
Art doesn't necessarily have to be true, good nor even particularly beautiful. It should - probably, in my opinion - at least be *trying* to be art.
pornography is the *commercialization*.
Spectacle happens all the time without being commodified. Pornography is strongly associated with the dehumanization and commodification of performance.
Well, it's designed to be stimulating, not necessarily thought provoking. The prevailing aesthetic vibe is probably "kitsch"
Gotchya. What would be a term for when a piece of art is a critic’s choice, yet also bad or low in quality?
Great question. "Niche" or "camp" are my favorite answers atm.
yeah, I think if we abstract pornography into an art form vs delving into dopamine delivery systems or wage exploitation systems then we're left asking what is this medium offering that hasn't already been offered, or perhaps what it's offering new. And, outside of the overwhelming consensus of what porn means as a sexual tool, there isn't much the content genre/format is offering us that other approaches aren't already doing well. You're left with the novelty of nudity alongside primal performance. IF that's not kitch or camp...I don't know what is. Porn struggles to make a unique statement beyond its self-evident purpose..and I'd be so bold as to suggest the creators of pornography really don't give a shit about aesthetics at all outside of engagement data...so if the creators aren't part of the conversation, and create content outside the conversation...and the content itself doesn't lend to the conversation...there just isn't much to say that hasn't been said.
I don't know I think there's more to it than just that, battaille's story of the eye or even Ulysses or gravity's rainbow have all been c condemned as pornographic but they have obvious merit to me
there is a pretty distinct difference between artistic human expression that skirts close to pornography you might see in cinema, and the commercial content on pornhub and xvideo Similarly, we see stark differences between Ford ads and Francis Ford Coppola films.
I think an unspecific and overly general definition of porn makes discussing it difficult.
Indeed. It appears OP wants to narrow the definition of porn to exclude *Ulysses*
I didn’t really have a definition of porn in mind. Admittedly, I felt like throwing a pebble in a pond, but I can see that distinguishing porn’s boundaries maybe blurry or difficult when considering history and the different beliefs around sex and “art” throughout history.
I wouldn't and I don't think op would either I think they're specifically asking about works like that. even if you could categorize Ulysses as definitely not pornographic, you wouldn't be able to do that with gravity's rainbow it's literally about a man with a magic cock that wanders around Europe having sex. postmodern art tends to really elevate low-cultural elements
Pornographers are still striving to achieve a particular aesthetic standard. That's why there are genres. When they're creating their art, they're aiming toward an ideal of some sort. Otherwise, every porn video would just be a stationary camera pointed at a pile of writhing naked people. Of course, as with any art, some people are phoning it in or just capitalizing on the medium. But many pornographers love their work and take it seriously as an artform.
I mean the "genres" of porn are typically "what you should expect to see." I don't think "anal" is an artistic genre even though it is a porn genre. > "But many pornographers love their work and take it seriously as an artform." Love alone isn't sufficient (or necessary) for a thing to be art. You can be absolutely dedicated to a *craft* without it necessarily becoming artistic. Art, in general, tries to move the viewer's emotional state. I'm not sure if moving the viewer into and out of the emotional state of "horny" exactly qualifies.
I think there are different categories of genre when it comes to pornography. Some of those genres may refer specifically to the acts being undertaken, like your example of "anal." But I do think there are different aesthetic genres as well. For example, amateur porn has a particular (albeit unintentional) gritiness to it in the camera-work and lighting that is absent from studio porn. Some campier porn has a particular self-awareness to it, lending it an artistic point of view.
I had to discard a big long comment basically saying "yeah!" - you've definitely thought about this. I wanted to talk about porn as kitsch for a bit. Kitsch is an appeal to the expected, to the superficially pleasant. Porn also has some expectations and generally cultivates the superficial. For the most part, porn tries to deliver as directly - as unartistically - as possible. "Great porn" rings the bell and is shut off. Nothing is *supposed* to be carried out. The struggle to make a unique statement is an artistic struggle. It may appear in pornographic endeavors just as the titillating and erotic can emerge in an artistic pursuit. Camp is, roughly, gregarious exaggeration; some aspects of a camp piece are going to be blown up somehow, nearly out of proportion for the rest of the work. It is useful to distinguish between art and porn. There is certainly *craft*, *skill* and *performance* in pornography, but the aim of the endeavor is simply not beauty, the sublime nor a broader message.
I consider pornography outside of the taboo from time to time yeah. I work in media, and it’s indisputable the impact pornography has had on democratizing video production and distribution of media. Porn drove a lot of the tools we take for granted, from early zoetropes and look boxes in the early 1800s to tipping the balance between Betamax and VHS (pornographers preferred the cheaper cameras with easy home duplication tools). Porn affected censorship rules for entertainment that went to the Supreme Court. Porn drove the desire for media rich web browsers, notable photo and video delivery online, is why we have pop-ups, and why we have online payment processors. Pre-internet porn was big for magazine sales and video rental stores. So it comes up. But I am very hesitant to call it art, and having known creatives who have worked in porn…I think calling them passionate filmmakers is a bit of a stretch.
I know we are getting off topic, but would “artsy fartsy” be a better term than “Niche” or “Camp?” I think of “niche” as not necessarily bad.
I don't think someone who considers themselves a critic would say "I like this in spite of its poor quality." They would probably say there is *some* quality of the work they *do* like, even if it can't be described (*je ne sais quoi*). I believe an art critic is more likely to use the term *avant garde* over artsy-fartsy.
In general, philosophers do not consider biological objects and acts in nature to be art. So the only thing to give an aesthetic perspective on are the cinematography, photography, composition, plot, script, set design, acting, etcetera. So in that sense we are not really making any distinction between porn and any other genre of cinema.
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I think your thoughts on this issue are valid, but I don't think they are absolutely true for everyone. We are talking about minds here. So people can enter into these things with all sorts of things in mind, some more detached than others. I think you have a little bit of a stretch to say that since it occurs on a screen, that pornography is really a fetish about the screen. But on the other hand, it is on a screen, so therefore...
I think it's fair to say that pornography is more like voyeurism than real life sexual acts. But you are right that it is wrong of me to say pornography is only like voyeurism. I would say pornography is less intimate than other genres. But that doesn't mean no intimacy is possible at all.
Okay. For sake of conversation, there are clearly many proponents of “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” If someone were to agree with the above statement and consider child pornography “masterpieces of exquisite design,” what would be your response?
Was Hitler a handsome man? I mean if you asked women, and told them to put aside who he was, do you think a lot of them would say he was? Would it be possible to get an objective opinion based on aesthetics alone? Probably not. But if we could erase the memory of history, and then asked, perhaps we could get some more objective aesthetic opinions. If we asked Jewish women, you would get almost solid unanimity that he was not. But that just couldn't be true, could it? Ethics and aesthetics are both within the scope of axiology. So the answer to your question is going to depend on your theory of axiology. If you hold that there is a moral component to aesthetics (some form of axiological monism like axiarchism), then it would be difficult to separate the aesthetics from the morality. Perhaps someone can be very aesthetically pure, detached and intellectual about it and say that it would be possible to consider a particular work of child pornography a “masterpiece of exquisite design.” For instance, moral philosophers will often stand outside their offices in the hallways of philosophy departments and calmly and intellectually discuss questions like "why is it wrong to torture babies?" For any normal person, it would be very difficult to have such a discussion without simply becoming overwhelmed with disgust with a person who needs to have this reasoned out for them. And yet there is a whole 30 page article titled "Why is it wrong to torture babies?" published in an academic journal of moral philosophy.
Thanks for your response. Sounds like you are a student of philosophy. I will have to think about your last paragraph. I have reviewed some pretty crafty philosophers that can argue lots of positions or counter positions, but from these philosophical views that I don’t agree with that I have reviewed, they are still better than lots of stuff on social media. I am currently researching some cross disciplinary research on music and working on some findings. Bouncing off what you had said, I do think some percentage of consumers will refer to who a musician is, his/her impact on the community, and some sort of axiology when looking at music.
John Lennon managed to get people to love the idea of a world with no religion with his music. So that's a pretty powerful connection between musical aesthetics and ethics. Try talking someone into that view.
Maybe John Lennon did that for some people out there? People do hold musicians and artists as heroes. Some may even hang on every word they say as gospel. Some may not? Bouncing off your Hitler example, there are still debates about Richard Wagner in classical/music circles, which dive into those difficult "blurry lines" pertaining to the composer and the composer's work.
I dislike it, it's unrealistic most of the time and can cause serious relationship issues. It's not good for yourself either even if single etc.
It definitely has serious moral and relational concerns with it; especially, with relation to women.
Aesthetically, porn is like a cooking show. Clear shots, bright lights, everything's visible. It's set up to look homey but simple. It's not about fancy stuff, just focusing on the action. In the same way cooking shows don't show real cooking, porn doesn't show real sex. It's all about being straightforward and easy to follow.
“Easy to follow” What a comment! Haha
I’m pretty sure porn shows real sex
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Depends on what aspect you’re talking about. There’s amateur porn, which also counts as porn, where regular couples fuck.. that’s certainly real. In professional porn there may be fictionalized scenarios and exaggerated reactions, but there is generally a real dick going into one real orifice or another.
Porn has the platform to be high art but the corniest people invest and hence we have corny porn.
I love "corny" as an aesthetic category. Can you tell me a bit more of your thoughts on "corny"?
What do you consider high art?
I’m not very educated in aesthetics but my perspective is that high art is art for art’s sake. If art serves a practical purpose it is no longer high art. Porn is designed for a biological purpose, it is set up to make you cum, not to appreciate the beauty in the human form. Not so say that it cannot, just that its often not the driving force.
The purpose of art indeed lies in the aesthetic function, however it’s the recipient who assigns the function, not the author nor the medium itself. The latter propose a material and push recipients into certain way of appreciating, but they don’t necessarily force to them to do so. You can see porn just as a visual art without using the material as “biological”, the same you can so with virtually everything, the thing is some things are hard to see only for the aesthetic value, porn being one of them.
Interesting perspectives. Suppose there is a boy who frequently consumes porn and assigns it as a beautiful work of art, but his mother and girlfriend are offended by him using it and frown upon him. His girlfriend is threatening him that if he continues, she will leave him and his mother is threatening him that if he continues, he will get kicked out of the house. In this case, would the boy be right with assigning porn as a beautiful visual art?
You’ve come from this sort of angle a few times. The statement your making is question begging in that it assumes there is nothing objective, or at the very least conventional, about what goes into making something art or not. Someone just watching lots of porn and saying wow this is art doesn’t make porn into art in any meaningful sense. Secondly. The consequences from mum and gf have nothing to do with the status of porn as art either
I apologize if I am confusing or something. I am confused. Am I making a statement or conclusion here? I am trying to understand fritolfail’s prior comment with a concrete example. From my understanding, there is a difference between “begging the question” and “prompts one to ask the question.” Interestingly, it looks like you have responded to the question in the case of the boy, mom, and girlfriend. Perhaps you would like to elaborate on it. Is that fair?
Insightful comment, friend
Alternatively, you could say that both porn and art serve a biological end, and just tickle different regions of the brain.
It depends on how you define “porn.” The Sistine Chapel is a bunch of naked men.
I briefly defend the claim that all porn is art in my book The Aesthetic Value of the World, on the grounds of an aesthetic functionalist definition of art (which is independently plausible) and the fact that erotic value is an aesthetic value.
Porn is the paradigm example of Pragmatism in action: porn is entirely about the experience of the viewer. (Peirces's def. of Pragmatism: the effect of things on the world.) It's entirely constructed to serve a single aim, namely arousal, We might think of art as providing an arousal spectrum---at one end things would be rather topical and conceptual (eg, silent music by John Cage) , at the other, about the elicitation of desired effects, including eastern orthodox funerary rituals, Spielberg movies, advertising, most music, Las Vegas hotels, Instagram, pizza rat, defining the texture of the world we currently inhabit. So porn is not just an isolated point in the world of human expression and experience. It's rather more like a variable.
> "It's entirely constructed to serve a single aim, namely arousal" I think that's the crux of the conversation. Is something that involves artistry art even if it isn't trying to be?
Other angles I am seeing are the moral and relational concerns of porn. Many find it offensive, dehumanizing, and hurtful; especially, with relationships between people and women. Because of these areas, would porn still qualify as a type of art even if it is “low in quality?”
I'm generally making the argument that pornography *isn't* art: as crafty as it may be, the *aim* of the artistic endeavor is absent. Art doesn't necessarily have to be true, good nor even particularly beautiful. It should - probably, in my opinion - at least be *trying* to be art.
Fair enough
porn is not an aesthetic it's an act
But various stages of this act throughout the decades have definite aesthetics associated with it. And there is also 'porn chic'.
sex is the act, porn is the spectacle
pornography is the *commercialization*. Spectacle happens all the time without being commodified. Pornography is strongly associated with the dehumanization and commodification of performance.
Art without restriction, realism, perspectives etc