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Disclaimer: Several of the images featured in this article are sexual and explicit in nature.
In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart delivered America’s most famous definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” At the time, he was defending Louis Malle’s The Lovers , a 1958 French film starring the smoky-voiced Jeanne Moreau as an adulterous housewife. The black-and-white romance is tame by today’s standards; the case itself would be ludicrous in our era of Pornhub.
Yet academics worldwide continue to debate the distinction between art and pornography. In America, where both have been integral to conceptions of free speech, an adult film star and our president are currently vying for moral authority on a very public platform. Like the Stormy Daniels affair and all other good sex scandals, explicit films—whether they should be classified as art or pornography—often raise questions about gender equality, power, and even capitalist structures.
After all, it’s harder to overlook a sex tape than a painting. Curator Jenny Schlenzka has put a highbrow example of the former on view in an exhibition at Performance Space New York (it’s also online , though decidedly NSFW). The 1974 film, titled Blue Tape , is a collaboration between writer, artist, and punk goddess Kathy Acker and conceptual artist Alan Sondheim. The brainy pair discuss Freudian dynamics (Acker refers to Sondheim as her father and says she uses him as an analyst to access otherwise unreachable memories) before launching into sex.
Acker complains about Sondheim’s technique, and the nebbish Sondheim doesn’t stop talking throughout his entire blowjob. Schlenzka has described the film as “almost unwatchable.” It’s certainly difficult to listen to Sondheim philosophize at an increasingly higher, more urgent pitch. As the actors excavate the ways in which power shifts during sex, the ability to receive pleasure becomes increasingly at odds with maintaining control.
When asked whether she thinks the work is pornographic, Schlenzka gives a complex answer. “It’s not pornographic because it’s not meant to be arousing,” she tells Artsy . “But there’s a pornographic element in how it’s explicit. Also what you’re left with is a sense of estrangement, not a sense of connectedness.” Pornography, in her mind, is “never about warmth or emotional proximity.”
Schlenzka articulates a few of the many frameworks that scholars have used to distinguish art from pornography. In his 2012 paper “Who Says Pornography Can’t Be Art?” University of Kent senior lecturer Hans Maes outlines what he believes are the four major theories, and then argues against them.
First: Pornography is sexually explicit, while art is not. “Art reveals in concealing, whereas pornography conceals in revealing,” he simplifies. Acker’s film, obviously, doesn’t conceal much.
Second: Pornography is exploitative, vulgar, immoral, and ultimately harmful, where art is not. One need only look at the story of Auguste Rodin ’s muse, Camille Claudel , or one of Pablo Picasso ’s many discarded lovers to see how painters and sculptors—not just self-proclaimed pornographers—have destroyed, or at least damaged, women’s lives throughout their processes.
Third: Pornography is one-dimensional, sans artistic merit, as “the pornographer’s sole intent is sexual arousal.” Pornography is an industry, its products “mass-produced commodities.” This neglects, of course, the commercial nature of the art world and the fact that some pornography has a more complex agenda.
Still from a film by Erika Lust. Courtesy of Erika Lust.
The last argument is about “prescribed response,” says Maes. “Indeed, the fact that we speak of consuming pornography and of appreciating art indicates that there is a fundamental difference in how we are meant to engage with both kinds of representation.” The two approaches, he argues, are not mutually exclusive.
Over five decades ago, Carolee Schneemann was already producing this kind of erotic feminist film. The artist, whose first comprehensive retrospective just closed at MoMA PS1 , created Fuses in the mid-1960s. In the video, she and her partner have sex as their cat watches. In quick, shadowy, color-saturated shots, genitalia and copulating bodies flicker across the screen, interspersed with images of a window, the trees outside, and the cat’s silhouette. The artist controls her own representation and pleasure, resisting objectification. Schneemann fought against some of her feminist contemporaries’ belief that all pornography must carry a misogynist message.
Notably, some of the male artists best known for working at the intersection of art and pornography take alternate approaches. The Destricted film series, released in 2006, features work by Larry Clark , Gaspar Noé, and Matthew Barney . Isolation, alienation, and devalued sexuality feature prominently in their films, which respectively focus on men auditioning to be pornography actors; people masturbating alone; and the costumed artist penetrating a machine—specifically, a deforestation Caterpillar truck. And for a more romantic investigation of the line between art and pornography, see Ragnar Kjartansson ’s 2015 video Scenes from Western Culture, Lovers (Álfrún Magnúsdóttir and Atli Bollason).
Still from Elin Magnusson’s Skin (2009). Courtesy of the artist.
On the other side of the spectrum is Swedish artist Elin Magnusson, whom Maes cites in his article. In her 2009 film Skin , which has been on view in venues from New York’s New Museum to Sweden’s Arbetets Museum, two figures in nude bodysuits start making out, cutting away parts of their costumes as they grow more aroused. Magnusson describes Skin as “art meets porn,” suggesting, as Maes does, that the categories need not be mutually exclusive. The artist combines larger ideas about intimacy, self-revelation, and the body into a work that, ultimately, still ends with explicit sex. Magnusson’s work aligns with that of another Swede working well outside of a fine art context, Erika Lust. According to her website, the director considers herself a leader in the “ethical adult cinema” movement. Lust compares the ethos behind her work to that of organic produce in the age of fast food, advocating fair labor practices, a focus on women’s pleasure, diversity, and high aesthetic quality.
Notably, the work of artists like Schneemann and Magnusson subverts one of Schlenzka’s ideas about pornography: that it requires estranged partners. As the pair of artists challenged that conception, they also created aesthetically elevated footage. In contrast, the artist Andrea Fraser once made a prosaic sex tape about a meaningless encounter to address other targets: money and the New York art world. In her film Untitled (2003), she sleeps with a collector who paid around $20,000 for the experience (and a DVD recording of the encounter). Fraser examines the relationship between artist and collector, art and prostitution. That’s not to mention the relationship between artist and critic: Notably, Guy Trebay’s New York Times Magazine piece from 2004 further objectified her, highlighting Fraser’s physical attractiveness and likening her to a “hooker with the heart of gold.”
Fraser’s approach, with an overhead camera capturing the tryst, links her back to Acker. “It’s one of the first truth-and-sex tapes,” says Schlenzka about Blue Tape , suggesting that it’s also a forerunner to Paris Hilton’s explicit, leaked footage. Celebrity sex tapes, she says, have “a big impact on the public mind and public consciousness,” whether or not they are intended as art. Schlenzka goes a step further, connecting the country’s prurient interest in these projects to the voyeurism inherent in today’s social media culture. One wonders, if Acker were alive today (she passed away in 1997), just what her Instagram account might look like.
For his part, Maes has written that we should encourage artists “to make intense, powerful, and profound works of pornographic art and rescue this much-maligned genre from the clutches of the seedy porn-barons.” Elsewhere, in a 2017 paper titled “The Aesthetics and Ethics of Sexiness,” he calls for “radical egalitarian pornography” to alter viewers’ perceptions of sexiness as they relate to such factors as gender, race, age, class, and disability. The distinction between art and pornography becomes less interesting than work that pushes at the boundaries of the two.

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Published April 13, 2015 12:00AM (EDT)

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This article originally appeared on AlterNet .
According to Rule 34 , if it exists, there's a porn for it. Rule 34 doesn't, however, guarantee there's a decent porn for it. What if you want something that's--I don't know--classier, I suppose? Smut that's plenty sexy, but also artistic and intelligent and just less...gross.
If you're looking for some not-so porny porn, start with the seven sites below. Like Swedish art films of yore, these sites occupy a space somewhere between art, erotica and porn. Some are even part sociological study and thought experiment. Or at least that's what you can tell yourself when you look at them instead of bourgeois ol' regular porn.
Hysterical Literature , an art project by Clayton Cubitt, is a collection of stark black-and-white videos, each featuring a woman sitting at a table reading aloud from a book of her choosing. However, under the table, there is an unseen person equipped with a back massager who is assigned to distract the reader as she reads.
As the vibrator does what vibrators do so well, the women try to keep it together and keep reading, but begin to show signs of losing focus with a little gasp, a quick intake of breath or wiggling in their chairs for a better position. They fight to keep their composure, and it's completely fascinating. Here's Janet reading from “Friendship and Character” by Ralph Waldo Emerson . It's that line between control and loss of control that's so interesting about Hysterical Literature .
“On the surface level I want to short-circuit the practiced poses of modern media-savvy portrait subjects. On the next level I want to explore the battle between the mind and the body. On the level after that I want to explore the relationship of female sexuality to society's concepts of shame. On the final level I want to explore the cultural contrast between art and sex, particularly how people react to the mixture of the two,” writes Cubitt. (The site is free)
I Shot Myself , aka Project_ISM, is a collection of nude selfies taken by women (and a few men). What makes this different than just a collection of nudie pics to leer at--which is certainly is as well— is the intent behind the site and the Euro/arty vibe of the photos (the site is based in the Netherlands).
By taking their own photos, contributors are wresting control of their images from pornographers, and creating a joyful, creative and often sassy celebration of female sexuality.
“What inspires women to submit their naked photos online?” reads the Project_ISM Principle. “The short answer is--control. The ability to show yourself on your terms, how you'd like to be seen, free from the distortion of someone else's viewpoint and the sanitizing of Photoshop. For some contributors this is an exposition of pure art. For others it's a rebellious gesture, erotic expression, a desire to be desired, or a cathartic process. And for everyone, as we're told every day, it's just hugely fun.” (Pay site with free previews .)
Audio Porn is a stripped-down Tumblr site with little to look at, save for the explanation “A collection of the sexiest sounds.” The press n' play audio clips have brief labels like “Boy Masturbation,” “Sex on a Squeaky Bed!” and “Vibrator Orgasm” and include no photos or other information. But damned if they aren't sexy. The sound clips feel shockingly intimate, like overhearing a neighbor or roommate in the throes of sexual thrall. It plays on whatever our aural equivalent of voyeurism is, and seems both arousing and transgressive. At the same time, the sound-only format lends a visceral immediacy and allows space for imagination. (Free.)
Beautiful Agony , a collection of short films submitted by users showing their faces during orgasm, is celebration of la petite mort. “Beautiful Agony began as a multimedia experiment,” explain founders Richard Lawrence and Lauren Olney on the site. “We wondered whether film of a genuine, unscripted, natural orgasm - showing only the face - could succeed where the most visceral mainstream pornography fails, and that is, to actually turn us on.”
It is a indeed a turn-on, and thought-provoking as well, if you want to go that way. The experience of going toward and riding the throbs of orgasm is so outside the realm of the rest of our lives. What other thing gets us to this place of grunting and sounds that leads us to a state of transcendence somehow both grounded in, and sublimely beyond, the physical? And these faces contorted in orgasm reminds us that there is a bit of agony in it. If you didn't know the experience yourself, to see someone moaning and grimacing in orgasm's throes would look, well, you probably would not want to "have what they're having."
Literotica has user-created erotica, including poems, stories, audio clips, drawings and anything else deemed erotic by the user base. The user-created content means that there's plenty you'll find hot, but to get there, you'll have to wade through some possibly weird-ass stuff (uh, no judgment!) created by anyone with a modem and a sweaty, fevered dream.
This means don't go picking categories randomly lest you end up like I did, unhappily in the midst of a story about “That 70s Show” called “Red Rules the Roost” in which everyone in the whole damn family has sex with each other, including the old dad Red. Yes, RED. I contacted my friend, a cool Bay Area techie chick, one of many women who'd recommended the site, to say basically, “WTF? RED?!” But she was undeterred in her Literotica love, “Hahahaha. but that's the best thing about erotica! No gingers were harmed in the making of that story!”
Fair enough. So yes, do go, but follow your trail of passion, not your trail of morbid curiosity or you might end up in SciFi/Fantasy section beholding this passage: “the dark, prehensile limb coiled itself around my left thigh in answer, coming from the inside and curving back around to the front, constricting and shifting up before the tip fluttered playfully along my crotch.”
MakeLoveNotPorn.tv , promotes the glories of real world sex via sexy videos submitted by regular people (uploaders get a 50% cut of rental fees. “MakeLoveNotPorn.tv is of the people, by the people, and for the people who believe that the sex we have in our everyday life is the hottest sex there is....We are not 'amateur' - a label that implies that the only people doing it right are the professionals and the rest of us are bumbling idiots. (Honey, please.)” writes moxie-filled founder Cindy Gallop. At MLNP, you won't be offered 8 billion varieties of “overemoting woman with huge boobs gets 'nailed'”--unless that's what you want—but human sexuality is all its diverse glory. Or Gallop puts in, not porn, but “making pegging, married, cinematic, teasing, experimental, owowowheynow, firsttime,softserve, yummy, toytime, gushing, succulent, orgasmic, spanking, dressedup, gentle, Italian, downtown, strappedon, happy, romantic, GAY, blissful, backdoor, condomhot Love.”
On XConfessions , acclaimed filmmaker Erica Lust turns two user-submitted confessions, real life stories or fantasies into short erotic films,with lovely production values, fleshed out characters and even a plot. (Note: “plot” usually ends up with much naked rutting.) There's all kinds of variety as well. Current offerings include a randy pool boy, lesbians, a dominatrix, seducing strangers, Skype sex, and even friggin' IKEA. Hot! And coming later this month... Mad Men porn .
Copyright © 2022 Salon.com, LLC. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON ® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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