by Jon Lackman | 30 April 2008 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the May 2008 issue of Art in America, Sue Taylor writes on recent histories of the erotic image. She dives into scandal straight away, of the scholarly kind:
In his 1987 Secret Museum, a lively and polemical history of pornography, Walter Kendrick shows how Western culture is still riven by a debate begun in ancient Greece … “Pornography,” he states, “names an argument not a thing.” His assertion captures the contingency of the category so aptly that we can almost forgive Kerstin Mey for filching it [in her 2007 book Art and Obscenity]. “Obscenity names an argument rather than an object,” she announces.
Mey, Taylor writes,
has produced an ambitious if flawed survey … When Wikipedia appears as a source in an endnote, we’re alerted to the author’s unreliability … [she] misspells the names of Bernd Becher, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Stewart Home, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Quinn, Pipilotti Rist and Salman Rushdie … it’s hilarious but also maddening when she writes “seamen” for “semen.”
Of Alyce Mahon’s 2005 survey Eroticism and Art, Taylor writes:
A more intelligible writer than Mey, Alyce Mahon … believes that pornography involves power not sex, whereas “erotic art is about equality between members of the opposite and same sexes.” In this politically correct approach, Mahon relies on analyses developed 40 years ago by feminists struggling against the objectification of women while trying to maintain a place for women’s pleasure. She ignores subsequent discussions of the complex psychic mechanisms of fantasy as well as theories of spectatorship that admit viewers’ cross-gender identification with various subjects in an image, male or female.
Taylor then praises Jennifer Doyle’s 2006 book Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire for its “dazzling insights”:
In her essay “Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art and the Rhetoric of Prostitution” … Doyle theorizes that the rhetoric of prostitution in criticism manages a fear that art, like money, “has no inherent value, no value outside relations of exchange” … Doyle ingeniously probes the meaning and legacy of [the prostitute], showing how the sexually compromised woman (Olympia, Nana, Sister Carrie) becomes an allegory of the artist in relation to the market — both are forced to sell something that should have no price, that should indeed be priceless … [critics also despaired] to distance the labor of the artist from the labor of the housewife, performed out of love and commitment and for free. This type of work would be the ideal analogue for the work of art — were it not the exclusive purview of women.
