Almost exactly ten years ago, I asked on (the older, no-longer-public version of) this blog whether it was possible for pornography to actually be artistic, or whether movies had to draw the curtain in order to remain art. Readers contributed to a conversation on the subject, but the consensus seemed to be “no,” and that was my own view, too. And that conversation came back to mind when I read Camille Paglia’s comment about contemporary pornography, that “explicit sex has become so diffused through the general culture that it’s lost its charge, which once came from the sizzle of transgression.” Paglia, who “continue[s] to support and defend pornography,” regards what she’s seen lately as “too-formulaic” and boring.
I wonder if Paglia is familiar with X-Art (need I say, NSFW?), which has changed my mind and proven to me that hard-core pornography can, indeed, be artistic. I know this is a subject which invites giggling, but I’m absolutely serious. X-Art has produced explicit sex videos that actually manage to express depth and meaning. If, as Louis Menand says, Larry Flynt managed to “put the shame back in sex” after Hugh Hefner had made it sophisticated and glamorous in the 60s, X-Art has managed—or at least, is making a strong effort—to reverse that deterioration, and put the beauty back into sex.
I don’t subscribe to X-Art, so I haven’t seen all their work, and some of it reiterates the ordinary sort of thing. But in their best videos, they manage to portray sex as an act of love, fun, and joy, rather than denigration, nastiness, pain, domination, or mere shock value. Yet they do this not by eschewing adventure or fantasy, or by producing boring or unsexy works. Instead, the producers put a high priority on beauty, pleasure, and happiness—their videos are celebrations of sex as an ideal that engages the heart as well as the body. It actually seems inappropriate to refer to X-Art as “pornography,” which literally means “dirty writing.” Their work is absolutely not dirty.
Art is about conveying a world-view which we are invited to judge based on our own priorities and values. When you look at a painting or a sculpture or a dance and respond to it artistically, your mind is saying “I want to live in the world this artist has built,” or, conversely, “That world is not what life is really all about.” The world that X-Art creates is no less an artistic presentation because of its explicit sexual content. On the contrary, the company’s producers have shown us an idea of sex that invites serious evaluation in addition to its powerful titillation. And what it invites is ja sagen.
I know, I know. Put that way, it doesn’t seem like the kind of “charge” or “sizzle” that Paglia’s talking about, but it is. In a culture where the left sees sex primarily in terms of power, the right in terms of shame or duty, and the porn industry sees it in terms of routine and even mechanistic drones, X-Art’s explicit, unashamed, joyful embrace of sex and portrayal of it as a mutual exchange of pleasure and this-worldly happiness—as, in a word, human—is profoundly counter-cultural; profoundly transgressive; profoundly new. And, in my opinion, a profound artistic achievement.
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