Somewhere between watching Debbie Does Dallas and contemplating the tall, wooden phallus nestled in an obscure corner of the DUMA, one begins to wonder if romance is indeed dead. Then a wrapped package of crème-filled Red Velvet Bingles ends up on your front porch, and it is confirmed that love has no place on the modern college campus. Any idealized Valentine date involving chic art and chi-chi wine is immediately disregarded. The idea of art, always synonymous with l'amour and the finer things of life, is irrelevant for the disenchanted Duke student. We have come to judge this campus as an isolated, dysfunctional segment of society, although the art world would have us believe otherwise. This phenomenon that we grunt about so often is not merely a localized concept.
Consider two of the most recent museum openings in this country: "The Erotic Museum" in L.A. and the "Museum of Sex" in New York City. Love, lust and everything in between are now quite the plat dû jour. Current exhibitions are Sex and Technology, and How NYC Transformed Sex in America. Times appear to be a-changing for those who tend to separate their Monets from Ron Jeremy.
No one seems to know where art ends and pornography begins. In 1884, John Singer Sargent painted his explosive Madame X. The subject was a high society woman, wearing an elegant black dress and standing poised before the artist. Her strap had fallen off her shoulder. Chaos ensued. Pornography! The public was outraged that such a display of flesh could be tolerated. Fast-forward a century later and bare shoulders reign supreme.
Controversies over sexuality have been intrinsic to the history of art, surfacing anywhere from the subliminal to the overt. Georgia O'Keefe's renowned flowers are literally blooming with a masked symbolism. Picasso chose to alienate the nude body from itself; Modigliani chose to re-acquaint the body with itself. Then there are the short films of Andy Warhol. His obsession with everyday activities led him to film an hour and a half of a man sleeping, then another hour of a man masturbating. He later produced a series of racy films in the 1960s, including the trilogy Flesh, Trash and Heat. Vito Acconci, a performance artist, also fell into the overt camp. In 1972, he created a site-specific installation piece where he built a ramp over a gallery floor and then laid underneath. When visitors walked into the gallery above him, he would masturbate and verbalize his fantasies.
According to James Joyce, "The difference between pornography and art is that art is aesthetic and pornography is kinetic." Implied is the idea that art has a purely aesthetic value and cultural significance that pornography does not. The recent burst of sex museums directly confronts such an assumption. They are attempting to bring works dealing explicitly with sex and pornography into the canon of art. Context becomes primary. That Playboy centerfold may not seem like "high art" sitting on your bathroom floor, but hang it up in a museum and it takes on a whole new meaning. In that very process, pornography becomes a comment on pornography. Maybe Warhol put it best, "Art is what you can get away with."
Regardless of what is pornography and what is art, the fact remains that you should not be too distraught over the Red Velvet Bingles given the state of things. We admittedly do not have any sex museums in the Triangle vicinity, but there is still that one enormous phallic shape in the DUMA and some Warhol films in Lilly. Take heart, young pilgrim, for you are not alone.
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