Why Some Pornography May Be Art
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"As far as manner-inspecificity is concerned, pornography seems to be analogous to comedy. The purpose of comedy is to cause laughter. Clearly comedy is manner-specific because we laugh at a thing presented in a certain way. This is because laughter has intentional content, and the same is true of sexual arousal. So even if the purpose of pornography is to sexually arouse, it may still be manner-specific." |
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"Why Some Pornography May Be Art" (2010) is an essay in the porn/art debate by Mimi Vasilaki which argues against Uidhir published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 34, Number 1, April 2010, pp. 228-233.
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In “Why Pornography Can't Be Art,”1 Christy mag Uidhir argues, as the title declares, that pornography cannot be art and thus that pornography is not art. according to Uidhir, this is because of the different ways in which pornography and art relate to contents and purposes. his argument for the impossibility of something being both art and pornography at the same time runs roughly as follows. If something is pornography, then it has the purpose of sexually arousing (some audience) and that purpose is manner-inspecific. If something is art, then if it has a purpose, then that purpose is manner-specific. So when the purpose is sexual arousal, then it is manner-specific. thus sexual arousal by art is manner-specific and sexual arousal by pornography is manner-inspecific. therefore, Uidhir concludes, something cannot be both art and pornography. here I argue that although this conclusion seems plausible, Uidhir fails to make a strong case for it because he does not establish that the purposes of art are necessarily “manner-specific” as opposed to the purpose of pornography, which is necessarily “manner-inspecific.” that is, the paper does not make it plausible either that pornography has manner-inspecific purposes or that art has a manner-specific purpose. I Uidhir’s exclusivity doctrine is intrinsically implausible. Let us take for example a work mentioned in the article, Red Butt from Jeff Koons’s kitsch photo series of “made in heaven.” Uidhir writes, “part and parcel of understanding Red Butt is recognizing that it depicts a sexual act involving Jeff Koons and Cicciolina. . . . Failure to do so precludes satisfaction of the purpose of the work” (p. 198). here he rightly says that the audience cannot interpret the work without the prior knowledge of who is depicted in Red Butt: the audience must recognize the sexual act and the subjects of the photo as the artist and his wife. In other words, the role of knowledge of context in understanding art is connected with the claim that manner-specificity is essential to the purpose of art. In the case of Red Butt, the appeal to extra-visual and contextual information enables fuller understanding of the artwork. however, in fact, the wider audience (rather than the art critics) perceives the trash aesthetics of Red Butt while being ignorant of Koons’s biography and this aesthetic irony might precisely be one of the purposes of the work. even if it is true that the audience’s recognition of the artist’s intentional self-parody requires knowledge of who is depicted in the photos, we don’t know if Koons intends his work to be understood (solely) in reference to or through this knowledge. It is plausible that Koons intended to blur the distinction between art and pornography by attempting to create art that is pornography. If we accept that pornography can never be art then if Koons intends to create art that is also pornography then he attempts the impossible; if we, on the other hand, allow for the possibility for an artwork to be both art and pornography and if we accept that Koons has succeeded in creating art that is pornography, then we can interpret Red Butt in the most natural way and say he has succeeded in creating both art and pornography. It seems therefore that regardless of the context, it is left to the audience to negotiate and finally decide, if they wish to, whether to appreciate Koons as pornography or as art (or both) despite the lines between these being unclear. this very ambiguity is part of the purpose of the work, which is lost on Uidhir’s account. his exclusive model cannot account for artists whose explicit intention is to defy dichotomies by doing art and pornography at the same time. For example annie Sprinkle, in reply to the question of whether she is doing art or pornography, insists against critics and defenders alike that she is “both an artist and a whore.”2 Uidhir’s position must be that, in effect, contrary to what she intends and believes, Sprinkle by definition cannot do both. even if we accept that “the” purpose of Sprinkle’s performance or Koons’s conceptual art is constituted by the manner in which this purpose is brought about, we still need to explain how this is so in contrast to pornography. In fact even if it were true that for all pornography, the way it is supposed to bring about its effect does not matter, by contrast with all art, that still would not show that one and the same thing cannot have both sorts of purposes. Uidhir considers the hypothetical scenario of an artist who tries to invert “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” by appropriating a Penthouse spread and thereby making a pornographic image but one that has the title “This is Pornography.” this, Uidhir claims, is art, not pornography. however, in my view magritte’s celebrated paintings, The Treachery of the Images, should not be understood by taking literally “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” because this phrase is decidedly only one part of magritte’s painting. the other part consists of an image of a pipe. When I look at the painting I do not just read “ceci n’est pas une pipe,” but I also see a pipe in it. the irony, if the two works are analogous, is that part of the point of “ceci n’est pas une pornographie” would be that we also see pornography in it. It is not just art that is constituted by, but is not identical with, pornography. the very conceptual challenge of the work would be that it seems to be both and there is no way to privilege one or the other. Uidhir’s exclusive characterization of pornography and art does not fit ordinary linguistic usage. For example, the explicit depictions of the Pompeii frescoes probably served the purpose of sexual arousal and the Victorians who discovered them regarded them as pornography. now they are categorized as art, rightly or wrongly, but we do not feel that we must say they are merely “pornographic art” and not pornography. although saying that the frescoes are pornography is perhaps an anachronism akin to describing the Odyssey as a novel, we don’t feel that the Victorians were plain wrong. In other words, when we classify the frescoes as art we don’t have to declassify them as pornography. this is rather because here pornography is understood as a kind of genre. the claim that the purpose of pornography is manner-inspecific may be challenged. First, consider that inspecificity of manner seems to mean that the way in which sexual arousal is produced does not matter. But then we are without an explanation of the difference between literary and visual pornography, and even between pornography and a dildo or Viagra. Second, as far as manner-inspecificity is concerned, pornography seems to be analogous to comedy. the purpose of comedy is to cause laughter. Clearly comedy is manner-specific because we laugh at a thing presented in a certain way. this is because laughter has intentional content, and the same is true of sexual arousal. So even if the purpose of pornography is to sexually arouse, it may still be manner-specific. mimi Vasilaki 231 II thus far I have examined the plausibility of Uidhir’s manner-specificity and inspecificity claims about art and pornography. now I want to turn to his argument, which is roughly this: (1) If something is pornography, then it has manner-inspecific purpose. (2) If something is art, then it has manner-specific purpose. (3) therefore, something cannot be both art and pornography. this seems to be non sequitur. Uidhir is assuming that the artwork has one purpose if at all but surely a work of art may in fact have many purposes. to illustrate the problem with Uidhir’s austere characterization of art and pornography, consider food and culinary art: (1) Food has the purpose of providing the necessary nutrients to support life and that purpose is manner-inspecific (a vitamin pill might do just as well as something served in a top restaurant). (2) Culinary art has the purpose of providing pleasure of the senses (taste, smell etc) and that purpose is manner-specific. (3) therefore if something is food, then it is not culinary art. this is clearly an invalid argument, and the reason for this is that it overlooks the possibility of the multi-functionality of culinary art. matthew Kieran makes a parallel point about religious art and propaganda art.3 We conceive a religious icon as a complex object or structure that performs many functions at once. Similarly with some propaganda art. Socialist realist posters for example are both propaganda and art, although this of course does not mean that all propaganda posters are art. to further substantiate the claim that pornography is not art, Uidhir compares pornography with using the hand as a shovel in order to say the hand is not a shovel. Similarly he explains that marcel Duchamp’s work “In advance of the Broken arm,” which deploys a snow shovel, cannot be both a snow shovel and an artwork: Uidhir says that Duchamp’s Fountain is “co-located with a urinal but Fountain is not a urinal.” however, it seems to me that when I use my hand as a shovel, my hand neither a shovel, nor co-located with a shovel. moreover, When some ready-made object such as a shovel or a urinal are appropriated as artworks, the things formed by appropriation do not loose their original functions and purposes as shovels or urinals do. there is no transformation from being a shovel or a urinal to being an artwork and not being a shovel or a urinal. When pornography is appropriated as art, the artwork inherits the functions of the pornography that is appropriated. thus art and pornography are not co-located, rather one things comes to both. the case of appropriating pornography is relatively clear when we deploy the notion of design for purpose: shovels are designed with the purpose of digging holes in the earth and pornography is typically thought to serve the primary purpose of sexual arousal. If the handle of the snow shovel breaks, then the shovel does not cease to be snow shovel; if pornography fails to arouse, it is bad pornography but it is still pornography. however, we should have in mind artifacts that, unlike the shovel, are designed to serve several purposes and to perform many functions. Uidhir acknowledges that pornography may have many purposes but it is not as clear that he believes the same is possible for art and therefore the comparison with the shovel that has a sole purpose loses its strength. to give another example, when comparing art with advertising, Uidhir relies on Jerry Fodor’s model of primary and secondary intentions. Fodor claims that an artwork is primarily intended to satisfy a reflexive condition, in other words, “the intention that the effect be brought about by the audience’s recognition of that intention” whereas in the advertisement case, the intention is primarily just that they should have their effect upon the audience.”4 however, according to Uidhir, the primary purpose of pornography may not even be sexual arousal (p. 194). So something might have the primary purpose of satisfying the reflexive condition and the secondary purpose of sexual arousal (as well as any other additional purposes it may have). If so then it is not clear even on Uidhir’s account why this something is not both art and pornography. I conclude that Uidhir’s claim that pornography is manner-inspecific by contrast with art, which is manner-inspecific is not plausible, and that his argument for that claim is invalid.
the term pornography is a nineteenth-century neologism from the greek porne [prostitute] and graphein [writing]. Pornography means “the writing of whores” and in some cases such as annie Sprinkle or the more recent Belle de Jour, pornography is also the art of whores.
University College London mimi Vasilaki Thanks to Nick Zangwill for discussion and comments. 233 1. Christy mag Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t be art,”
2. Linda Williams, “a Provoking agent, the Pornography and Performance art of annie Sprinkle,” Social Text 37 (1993): 117–33.
3. matthew Kieran, “Pornographic art,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 31–45. 4. Quoted by Uidhir: Jerry Fodor, “Déjà vu all over again: how Danto’s aesthetics recapitulates the Philosophy of mind,” Danto and His Critics, ed. mark rollins (oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 49.
