Abstract
We may sometimes wonder whether we are looking at art or pornography. Suppose I flick through a book of Egon Schiele’s works (for example Whitford 1981). The pictures are not just of nudes, which have long been artists’ subjects, but of women or men in various states of sexual arousal. Schiele draws himself and others masturbating (for instance Reclining Girl, 1910; Self-portrait Masturbating, 1911). Sometimes he shows us the subject’s genitals under lilted clothing (Seated Woman, 1914), putting us in the position of a voyeur. Gustav Klimt also produced sexualized images: for instance Danae (1907) portrays a woman in a state of ecstatic orgasm. Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) is as explicit as any pornographic photo, depicting an uncovered torso, the vagina fully exposed and offered to the viewer’s gaze. Before that, Peter Fendi (1796–1842) had produced many explicit paintings and lithographs of sex, including of group sex.
‘I know it when I see it.’
(Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, 1964, on pornography)
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© 2013 Stephen Mumford
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Mumford, S. (2013). A Pornographic Way of Seeing. In: Maes, H. (eds) Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367938_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367938_4
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