Art Or Porn?

Kinsey Parses the difference

By Brian Alexander

Is it porn or is it art? Or could it be art that also happens to be porn? What if it’s abstract and barely recognizable as anything having to do with sex, but the title uses the word “tit”? (Insert seventh-grade boy giggle here…)

I’ve been writing about sex for awhile now and still don’t have any answers to these questions, at least no answers that don’t sound like some convoluted undergraduate philosophy course. That’s dangerous because aside from one art history class in which I spent two semesters looking at slides of ancient Greek statues, the windows in Chartres cathedral, and post-modern drip paintings, my education in visual aesthetics came entirely from what I could learn by watching late night reruns of the Honeymooners and from Playboy.

So I was especially happy to talk to art historian and museum curator Jennifer Cahn. Cahn was given the enviable task of selecting works of art for the fourth annual Juried Art Show at the Kinsey Institute (yes, the sex research outfit) which starts May 29 on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington.

Cahn claims no special expertise in the art of sexuality or in erotic art or in porn. She knows her art, but she comes to the special purpose of the Kinsey show with the eyes of an outsider. So when she was confronted with 700 entries — the most ever for the show — and asked to pair that down to a more manageable number based on her own criteria, how did she do it?

“I had no limitations imposed by Kinsey,” she told me. “I reveled in that.” As the curator for the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, in Texas, she does have restrictions often imposed by parents of the school students who tour the museum so the freedom to choose art depicting sexuality was freeing. “I would look at a picture and fantasize what would happen if I showed that here,” she said of her home base, “and how quickly I would lose my job. But to me there was something daring about putting those inner thoughts and desires and anger out in a visual form that I really enjoyed.”

Ultimately, though, she had to choose and she confessed that her criteria were necessarily subjective. Art that seemed commercial, slick, tended to slip into porn in her judgment.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time with people who work in the “adult” industry in the great Los Angeles exurb, and not one of them has ever said they were making art. They’re trying to make a buck. Some try to do it with more craftsmanship than others and skill ranges from expert to woeful, but nobody says they make art. On the other hand, I have seen performance artists doing exactly the same things you can see in your average porn movie — and more — and they say they are making art.

Though I can’t say with any real authority if they are correct, I do think it might be helpful if those school kids who go to Cahn’s museum in Texas could see some art that deals with the erotic and with sexuality. That way, maybe when they grow up, they’ll be better equipped to make the distinctions.

Want to know more about art and sex? Read Brian Alexander’s recent MSNBC Sexploration column.

Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped. Looking for America Unzipped? Great! Ex/Urb supports independent bookstores. To find one (hopefully) near you check out the American Booksellers Association store directory.