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Notes -
I'm not a prude, I acknowledge that explicit sexuality (even unsimulated sex between actors) has its place in art. But your comment, while thought-provoking, has done nothing to dissuade me from my original perspective that human culture is not in any way enriched by a rendering of the bunny rabbit from Zootopia getting gang banged.
I'm just curious - what does it mean to "enrich" human culture? Do you have examples of modern works that have enriched human culture?
To me, it seems like it's useful to have that stuff around, just as a canary test that free speech is really working.
Since you asked for modern works, a world without the film Tár would be poorer than one with it.
Of course, I'm not calling for creepy fetish art to be banned. Just like "hate speech" - I think that people yelling racial slurs makes our culture slightly worse, but I'm not calling for them to be banned.
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Thank you, that makes me very happy! I really appreciate it.
Something I may not have emphasized enough was that there's a fundamental ambiguity in that claim. Does a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia getting gangbanged enrich human culture? Does, say, a non-sexualized drawing of a horse enrich human culture? We can't really answer the question as it's posed. We need more information, more context. Is the drawing of the horse Guernica, or is it something that a kindergartner put together with finger paints to take home and put on the fridge? That information is going to change how we answer the question. So it is with fetish art as well. That's my position.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture". We've been painting images for thousands of years and we've explored a tremendous amount of the possibility space. It's possible that we've simply run out of fresh ground to cover, within the confines of this one medium. But a painting with a sexual subject matter is no worse off than any other type of painting here.
I think the future possibilities of art lay in what could broadly be described as "narrative", and I do think some of those narratives will contain sexual content that might strike some observers as "excessive" at first glance.
Well now you're putting words in my mouth, which I don't appreciate. At no point did I claim that creepy fetish art doesn't significantly enrich human culture, but that non-creepy non-fetish art does significantly enrich human culture. Given the vast rate at which humans create art (e.g. 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day) and Sturgeon's law being what it is, the likelihood of any given artwork having a significant impact (positive or negative) on human culture is about the same as winning the lottery. Creating art is almost always done purely for the amusement of the creator himself, and I say this as someone who devotes a large chunk of his spare time to making and distributing music. Even the proportion of artworks which are created with the expectation of turning even a modest profit (or breaking even) are a small minority.
What I said was that depictions of Judy Hopps getting gang-banged fail to enrich human culture in even the most meagre way. That is to say, if someone draws Judy Hopps getting gang-banged, at best the existence of this "artwork" has zero impact on human culture whatsoever, and at worst it makes human culture very slightly worse (appeals to humanity's baser instincts, a waste of the artist's time when he could have spent it doing something more edifying, promoting gooning rather than self-improvement etc.). I'm not saying that art which depicts something beautiful or moving makes human culture significantly better; I'm saying that creepy fetish art will never make human culture even a little bit better and have a good chance of making it slightly worse.
I wasn't trying to attribute that claim to you at all. I'm sorry for the confusion. That's a claim that other people have made, and I brought that up to give some context about my thoughts on painting as a medium.
Right, and I disagree, for the all the reasons I outlined in the OP. I think that sexuality is privileged as an artistic subject matter, and therefore a pornographic painting is no worse off than a landscape, a still life, etc.
I can imagine an erotic or even pornographic artwork which enriches human culture, if only marginally. Heck, I don't need to imagine: Klimt's The Kiss (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)) was attacked as pornographic in his lifetime, and it's one of the most iconic portrayals of intimacy the twentieth century has given us. Alan Moore's From Hell depicts sexuality and prostitution very explicitly, and it's my favourite of his works (and I think superior to Watchmen). Lolita was banned in many countries, but remains a masterpiece. It's been a long time since I saw Antichrist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist_(film)) and, while I don't think the film couldn't have done without the unsimulated sex scenes, I still think it's an impressively disquieting and thought-provoking film. There are many erotic, even pornographic, works of art which I will defend and which I really do believe have enriched human culture in ways great or small.
I just don't think the category of "creepy fetish art depicting non-human characters made for perverts on commission, and for whom the creator feels his livelihood is threatened by the advent of Stable Diffusion" contains any such works - I think 100% of works in this category had either no impact on human culture, or a negative impact. And I have no reason to expect this state of affairs to change at any time in the immediate future.
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Back when the internet was younger--but old enough to load png files in seconds--the edgy memes going around my Uni were the various adventures of Smurfette, mostly of the pornographic sort. In one, Smurfette is getting it on with Papa Smurf; in another, she's banging all her fellow Smurfs.
High art it was not. But it was definitely more than porn--that is, the art had a point besides causing sexual arousal. The shock of seeing a childhood character (and I did see Smurfs on TV) going triple-X adds to the humor, but the reason these memes featured Smurfette and not, say, Strawberry Shortcake is because Smurfette was such an obviously sexualised character in the first place, yet aimed at children. The porno memes took the corporate-stated premise of the Smurfette and instantiated the subtext that any adult can see was there all along.
For added amusement, Smurfette is La Schtroumpfette in the original French, which sounds like someone bowdlerised "strumpet" by translating it into French, then German, then back to French. But this appears to be pure co-incidence - Google translate can't find a French translation of "strumpet" that looks anything like "Schtroumpfette".
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This concept is as old as animation and cinema.
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