Art and pornography are often thought to be mutually exclusive. The present article argues that this popular view is without adequate support. Section 1 looks at some of the classic ways of drawing the distinction between these two domains of representation. In Section 2, it is argued that the classic dichotomies may help to illuminate the differences between certain prototypical instances of pornography and art, but will not serve to justify the claim that pornography and art are fundamentally incompatible. Section (...) 3 considers those definitions of pornography that make an a priori distinction between pornographic and artistic representations. The difference between the ‘merely’ erotic and the pornographic is also discussed in this context. Section 4 provides a critical assessment of the most recent and elaborate arguments against the compatibility of pornography and art. Finally, in Section 5, a case is made for the existence of pornographic art, as a subcategory of erotic art. (shrink)

This paper takes a bottom-up approach to empirically investigate how people construct the meaning of obscenity, and offers an experientialist, cognitive linguistic account to explain why the term appears to defy definition and makes a problematic legal concept. To study the contextual dependence of the term, we examined the extent to which various item characteristics (such as genre, context, and the race or celebrity status of the people portrayed) and individual variables (such as gender, religion, sexual orientation and previous personal (...) and cultural experiences) influence our perception of seemingly obscene materials. We report correlations that have not been previously shown. The data support the thesis that the meaning of obscenity emerges in a cognitive-affective response that arises during a dynamic process of interpretation, and thus allows for extralegal factors to influence judgment. The results challenge the assumption that obscenity is a symbolic representation of objectively existing reality and argue that community standard of obscenity is a legal fiction. (shrink)