Crossing the Line

My art history class has given me another great question to blog about, here it is:

Nudity in art—when does it become pornographic? The human nude, especially female, as we have seen, is a time honored subject in art. Many devoutly Christian artists view the human body as God’s most supreme creation (in the Bible, it is written that man is made in the image of God). Some artists have centered their whole careers around the nude. In art school, students are still required to draw the nude from life. Surprisingly, some viewers still object to nudity in art. When does nudity cease to be beauty; why do people object to nudity, feeling that the viewing of it prurient? What is the difference between “nude” and “naked”?

This is a difficult question. Naked is meant to be prurient, Nude is meant to be artistic. Both still mean that the people have no clothes. But why do we not notice that the nude in art is also meant to be provocative, enticing and all art is to stir emotion, is this not what pornography does? We then go back to what is unhealthy for us as a people. A recent episode of Mad Men had used what was considered pornographic covers of magazines but they looked amazingly wholesome by today’s standard. The Vargas girls were definitely enticing depictions of women and were created for Playboy Magazine, yet the view of them as art is overwhelming. French postcards in the 1920’s, showing women scantily clothed, were considered pornographic, but are mild again by today’s standard. Acrobatic movements by women in silent films were considered pornographic in nature.

We are sexual by nature and when we are naked we expose ourselves and become vulnerable to each other. We are also judgmental, tending to have intense opinions on every subject. Something that has always been said about the internet is that we all sit “nekkid “behind the keyboard. We are faceless and left to a person’s imagination, but we allow ourselves to be vulnerable at that point and often use little or no judgment on each other. This is also the philosophical question about “What is Beauty?” To know beauty do we need to know ugly? Our young girls starve themselves to become what they consider beautiful and our children are unhealthy weights being fed the conditioning of a free society. America has not yet left its puritanical age, where all things must be pure in the mind or we fall short of the grace of God. During the Reformation even the Catholic Church painted fig leaves over the nudity of the bodies in the Sistine Chapel in response to the judgment of the people. Other cultures do not take this position and are not ashamed of the body making all viewing of the unclothed body profane as we do here.

In art, the study of the human form was always meant to glorify ourselves and keep the record of what we considered beauty. The curving line of a woman’s back along her thigh is a sensual line that can be seen abstractly as much as the phallic symbol of an obelisk. We still talk in code that has sexual innuendo placed on words that never before had that connotation. What does the word “gay” mean today? Our fantasy creatures today in video have the same strong sexual lines that those of the ancients did when depicted in sculpture or painting. It appears our strongest emotion is sexual. Today whether or not you clothe the body you still convey the sexual tension by gesture or proximity. When does it cross the line and become pornographic and not art? When the judgment of the viewer crosses the value line they have set for themselves and can see or feel an emotion that the artist may or may not have been trying to evoke.