Behold "Olympia" by Manet.
This one really caused a shit fit. One critic screamed, "She's not nude, she's NAKED!" What strikes you about this painting is how....brazen or shameless the model is. Her pose is provocative and unabashedly sexual. And yes, it took a while for people to get used to the idea, but this is a great work of art.
Fast-forward to the present day.
More nude women on couches, but this time they're in photographs instead of paintings. (By the way, you have no idea how hard it is to find nude photographs of women on couches with two cats in the picture, as well).
Again, the debate is sparked. Why is "Olympia" considered a work of art, but images of these two lovely ladies considered porn? Especially since "Olympia" is markedly different from Venus De Milo (from my last post) because hers is a blatantly sexually oriented pose, instead of that nude-as-the-ideal line of crap.
Again, the image of a nude woman MUST have some sexual element to the emotions it evokes. It's part of the package. Yet there's some mystical dividing line between "great art" and "pornography" so that if an observer of an image finds himself or herself aroused by the image, it's on that side of the line, whereas if the image is somehow neuter or asexual, it's considered a good thing.
I just don't get it. For me, the sort of image that is most likely to arouse any response on my part is that of the female form, and yes, the sexual element is there. It has to be. If there's no sexiness involved, it's boring.
And yet, there's a line between "art" and "porn," but nobody has a good answer for where that line is.
Except, of course, for the old legal maxim, "obscenity is whatever gives a judge a hard-on."
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