Is ‘pornographic art’ an oxymoron?

Several art critics and philosophers claim that ‘pornographic art is an oxymoron’. In other words, they argue that pornography and artistic value are mutually incompatible to the point that, at worst, pornographic representations cannot be art at all or, at best, are destined to be kitsch (poor) art. Nevertheless, there are highly appreciated and respected artworks classified as “erotic art”. So what distinguishes the erotic from the pornographic that precludes the latter’s artistic capacity?

Nobuyoshi Araki - The Look From Erotos, 1993

Nobuyoshi Araki’s famous close-up photograph of a woman’s eye, The Look, is an example of erotic art. The artist has tilted the image 90 degrees to make it evocative of female genitalia, eliciting sexual thoughts and connotations in viewers. However, the representation itself is not sexually explicit in any way. Instead, the evocativeness gives the work its sexually stimulating quality. Following Matthew Kieran, I define erotic as those representations that “aim at eliciting sexual thoughts, feelings and associations that are found to be arousing” (2001, p.32). However, this need not be the central aim of the artist or achieved via sexually explicit content. 

On the other hand, pornography’s definition and distinctions from the erotic are a lot more ambiguous. Whereas Kieran (2001)—one of the strongest advocates of pornographic art—argues that pornography differs from the erotic only with its sexual explicitness, Levinson (2005)—one of its most vigorous opponents—argues that this distinction stems from the intrinsic purpose of pornography to arouse the viewer sexually. Acknowledging that our main aim is to discuss and evaluate the arguments for and against the possibility of ‘pornographic art’ and the most well-accepted critique of it evolves around Levinson’s definition, I define pornography in terms of both (1) its sexual explicitness and (2) its aim of sexually arousing the viewer.

A. Kitsch and Pornography:

In the Western and conventional sense, art is valued because it employs exceptionally powerful and sophisticated techniques of prescribing our feelings, imaginings and attitudes to provide us with a more profound and richer understanding of what specific circumstances and personalities could or might not be like  (Kieran, 2001, p.42). In this regard, kitsch is considered bad art because it mimics its immediate predecessors by employing formulaic, one-dimensional, cliché mechanisms. It does not work on individual idiosyncrasy or subjectivity but aims at only copying the beautiful. Thus, it relies on universal stock images, the emotional charge of which is highly inter-subjective such as  "beautiful horses, pretty sunsets or cute puppies" (Kulka, 1988, p.20). Ultimately, the main reason behind these simple and formulaic input mechanisms is to get a predictable and simple output: to move every viewer in the same way without pushing them in any different direction or challenging any of their simple beliefs or thoughts.

1. Lack of Subjectivity

It is often argued that pornography and kitsch are almost interchangeable terms. Meaning that pornographic representations too rely on similar mechanisms and themes as kitsch which precludes pornography's artistic capacity. Being bound by arousing the viewer, there is no effort to capture the phenomenal qualities or the first-person perspective of the depicted subject in pornography. However, the viewer is drawn into the objective and physical attributes. It is characterised by graphic anatomical detail which diminishes the work's subjective capacity and directs the spectator's attention from people to organs (Bovens, 1998). As Scruton argues, a pornographic image then "is like a magic wand that turns subjects into objects, people into things" (1986, p.163). In this way, by relying on instantly and effortlessly identifiable depictions that lack subjective and associative qualities, like kitsch, pornography too avoids diverting the spectator's attention to anywhere but one spot—sexual arousal.

Titian - Venus of Urbino, 1538

On the other, not being bound by arousing the viewer, erotic art can retain a suggestive character and draw the viewer's attention to the phenomenal qualities of what is being depicted (Bovens,1998). For example, in Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), “it is not the sexual organs but the face, as a window to the soul," which provides the focus of attention (Scruton, 1986, p.154). This delineates the distinction between the beautifully depicted autonomous 'nude' of erotic art and the objectified and characterless 'naked' of pornography (Clark, 1956). The nude subjects of erotic art retain autonomy and subjectivity.

Titian - Bacchanal of the Adrians, 1523-26

Yet, there are multiple dilemmas in this argument. Firstly, many highly appreciated 'erotic artworks' depict their subjects similarly to pornography (1986). Even in Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians (1523-26), quite the opposite of what Scruton argues is true; the subject's face is excluded from the painting, our attention is drawn to the flesh of the body, and the sexual organs are positioned in the middle of the painting. Another example could be Renoir's nudes, such as the "Bather Arranging Her Hair" (1885), in which he objectifies his subjects by always portraying them as perfectly suitable for the era’s white male gaze (pinkish-white tones for the skin, red lips, blonde hair and curvy bodies) and depicting these naked women from behind, after a shower, in positions to emphasise their body shapes and sexual organs. However, we would not go so far as to suggest that we cannot appreciate such works as art.

Pierre Auguste Renoir - Bather Arranging Her Hair, 1885

Even if one ignores the existence of such 'erotic artworks' that lack subjectivity and depict their subjects in pornographic manners, there is still room to argue that pornographic representations can offer an insight into their subject's 'cognitive-affective attitudes,' preserving the work's subjectivity. Indeed, many archetypal pornographic representations focus on the first-person perspective and subjectivity of the person one is supposed to be sexually interested in. Nicholson Baker's Vox, for example, is a pornographic novel that focuses on the individual character's personality, fetishes and fantasies. It's more than just a narrative about sexual arousal. It aspires to be provocative via the personalities of the characters, as well as the idiosyncrasies and oddities of the language they use. Thus, to elicit sexual arousal, the viewer's attention is directed towards the characters’ desires, feelings and beliefs.

2. Lack of Expressiveness

Another argument against the possibility of 'pornographic art' is what Kieran calls "the problem of purposiveness" (2001, p.34). Again, the initial thought is that sexual explicitness in the service of arousal is inimical to artistic expressivity. This is because the more the explicit concentration is on physiological, biological and animalistic aspects of sexual behaviour, the less expressive choices there are, and the more the work relies on "formulaic markers for certain states, characters, and situations which are merely signalled in a minimal shorthand manner rather than drawn out in any complex and interesting way" (Kieran, 2001, p.34). 

The claim has some initial plausibility. It is often claimed that “the artist's activity in an artwork is to be understood as the expression of feelings or ideas in a given artistic medium” (Hayner, 1961, p.543). Then artistic expression is often taken to refer to deliberately embodying or objectifying a feeling or an emotion. In this sense, being bound by eliciting the feeling of sexual arousal in the viewer, the pornographer will try to make as much space as possible for sexual explicitness. In turn, the more space there is for sexual organs and the mechanics of sex, the less space and fewer opportunities there will be for the artist to express himself (Steiner, 1975).

However, I argue that "expression" and "expressiveness" must be distinguished and expressivity need not be defined based on the artist's expression of their inner world. Expression is something individuals do, it is "the outward manifestation of their emotional states"; expressiveness, on the other hand, is a quality that artworks (and other things) possess (Kania, 2017, 3.1). As Hayner argues, "by saying that a work of art such as a painted canvas or a piece of carved marble, is expressive, what we mean is that, under certain circumstances, it is capable of producing an effect which is distinctively aesthetic in a person who perceives or contemplates it" (Hayner, 1961, p.544). This effect is acquired by objects through association, through "the power given by experience to any image to call up others in mind" (Santayana, 1896, p.193). Thus, when discussing expressiveness, one is not concerned with how the artist expresses his inner conflict but how this painting expresses inner conflict.

Hence, there is no logical reason to claim that pornography cannot be expressive. Although the artist has no choice whether to be sexually explicit or not, choices remain regarding what acts and responses are represented, how bodily movements are depicted, what parts in our focus, how explicit the representation must be, what the facial expressions are, the angle of portrayal, the lighting, the colouration, and so on. All these choices remain available and enable the artist to create an expressive and multi-dimensional work in its form and structure which calls up feelings and thoughts beyond arousal.

Liliana Pavier - Aftercare, 2023

Liliana Pavier - untitled, 2023

Nevertheless, despite the choices remaining open to the pornographer to protect their work's expressiveness, one might still argue the intrinsic aim of pornography to move everyone in the same direction is mutually exclusive with the aim of expressivity to evoke different feelings and thoughts in every viewer. Thus, just like kitsch, pornography too must rely on formulaic mechanisms and stock images loaded with the inter-subjective charge of sexual arousal.

Although this argument seems plausible at first sight, it can be argued that sexuality, sexual desires, fantasies and fetishes are so complex and multi-dimensional that there can always be rich possibilities to work along expressive and creative lines to arouse the viewer. Certain viewers feel happy and peaceful when they look at works of kitsch, while others find these works incredibly dull and empty. They need to appeal to different, more complex and sophisticated works to feel the same kind of peace or happiness. Similarly, certain pornographic works such as those that appear in Hustle magazine can indeed arouse the majority of the viewers. However, there will always be a part of the viewers who appeal to works of, for example, Mapplethorpe's extremely expressive and original pornographic photographs to feel the arousal others get from cliche and formulaic pornography.

Robert Mapplethorpe - Dominic & Elliot (right), 1979 and Man in a Polyester Suit (left), 1980

3. Intended Reception of the Receiver

Moving on, even if one can acknowledge that pornography can have artistic value, according to some philosophers like Levinson, there is still the problem of the impossibility of appreciating something as art when one appreciates it as pornography (2005). This is because while pornography aims for the recipient to respond to the work with sexual arousal, art requires the recipient to respond with artistic interest. Levinson then defines 'artistic interest' roughly as the kind of interest the spectator has towards an artwork's “form and the relation of that form to its content; the way the content has been embodied in the form, the way the medium has been employed to convey the content" (Cooke, 2012, p.232). Thus artistic interest is best served by perceiving how something is created and represented. On the other hand, the pornographic aim of sexual arousal and release is best served by attending to what is represented and ignoring how it is represented. It essentially excludes attention to the vehicle, medium, form and manner, which are crucial for someone to have an artistic interest in work. Hence, Levinson concludes, "Nothing can be both art and pornography; or at the least, nothing can be coherently projected as both art and pornography; or at the very least, nothing can succeed as art and pornography at the same time."  (Levinson, 2005, p.239)

There are certain problems with this argument. First, it seems ill-motivated to argue that something cannot be art and pornography solely because it cannot be perceived as art and pornography at a given time t. It is quite compatible that receivers can take both a pornographic and artistic interest in an artefact, albeit not at the same time. Secondly, there is a lack of definition of what Levinson calls artistic interest. As Davies argues, the proper appreciation of an artwork cannot be achieved merely through the interest in how a form is employed in relation to a given content. Because such interest then seems to apply to a kind of appreciative interest that can be taken in artefacts in general—for example, a poster designed to promote a conference (Baxandall, 1985, ch.1; Davies 2012, p.68).

Acknowledging this issue, if artworks call for a particular kind of interest, then this cannot be an interest merely concerned with the elements of which they are composed or how those elements are put together, but also "how the assemblage of elements that make up the artistic vehicle is intended to function in the articulation of content. It is in virtue of these distinctive ways of articulating content  … that artworks must be regarded in a distinctive way" (Davies, 2012, p.71). In this sense, the kind of reception an artwork calls is grounded in what an artwork is and does.

Gustave Courbet - The Origin of the World (L'Origine du monde), 1866

This might allow one to describe certain works as ‘pornographic art’ as long as the sexually explicit content in the service of arousal can only be properly appreciated through the realisation of the artistic vehicle and the elements that make it up “such as form, style, or embodied point of view” (Cooke, 2012, p.236). One can give Courbet’s The Origin of the World and some of Schiele’s explicit drawings of women and young girls as an example of this situation. These were created with the non-artistic primary intended function of sexually arousing those who commissioned or bought them. However, their pornographic goal is attainable only through the realisation of what is artistically inherent to them.

B. Art and Ethics

The final argument against the possibility of ‘pornographic’ art comes from feminist ethics. It is argued that pornography is intrinsically immoral in the sense that it relies on the objectification of its subject. Kant argues that objectification means “treating a person as an object in the sense of a mere instrument for someone else's objectives”, thereby reducing this human to the position of a mere instrument (Kant, 1785, p.42). Objectification is a negative and immoral phenomenon since it involves harming a person’s humanity through instrumentalizing them. 

Nussbaum defines objectification as a multiply-variegated concept. She identifies, alongside the kind of instrumental objectification Kant argues, six other forms of objectification: lack of subjectivity,  denial of autonomy, fungibility, violability, and ownership (1995). Followingly, it is often claimed that pornography is fed on these forms of objectification. Women are often dehumanised by being presented as objects or commodities who enjoy pain, degradation, humiliation and other forms of assault. They are often depicted in submissive positions of servility, tied up, mutilated, getting raped and physically hurt in a context that elicits sexual arousal. This focus on aggressive, emotionless and alienated sex that dehumanizes women, in turn, is believed to deprive pornography of morality and, thus, artistic value (Nussbaum, 1995).

Now, the first issue with this claim is that one must bear in mind that pornography is fiction. Though it is also true that the storyteller has other illocutionary intentions, some of which may involve expressing her actual beliefs about the world; from the mere fact that something is reported in fiction, it does not follow that the fiction’s author is genuinely asserting any of these things (Cooke, 2012). As Theodore Gracyk argues, a representation's ethically problematic quality can never be reduced to the depicted subject matter since an artist may choose to show rape or other types of violent abuse to specifically warn or protest against them (1987).
But what if pornography is not just representing but also endorsing objectification and degradation? Even if that is the case, I argue that as long as an artwork is artistically valuable, its moral deficit cannot be inimical to its artistic value. A work that makes us envision hurting someone with pleasure may be equally, if not more, important as art than one that makes us picture the same event with revulsion. This is because “art and ethics are autonomous realms of value and, the criteria from the ethical realm should not be imported to evaluate the aesthetic realm.” (Carroll, 2000, p.351) One reason behind this is that whatever one identifies as the value of art must apply to all art. That is, as Carroll argues, “art qua art should be beholden to standards that are universally applicable to all art.” (2000, p.352) Thus, since not all art can be subjected to ethical evaluation (such as instrumental music or abstract art), this standard Carroll mentions cannot be moral. Since artworks are intended to promote aesthetic experience and art is the only practice intended at this aim, ‘the capacity to promote aesthetic experience’ is the only proper criterion for distinguishing art from other artefacts (Carroll, 2000). Though this need not mean that artworks cannot be subjected to moral evaluation. In the case of pornography, for example, Nussbaum’s arguments can indeed be true, and pornography can be intrinsically immoral. However, this does not preclude it from aesthetic value.

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