From: Gregory Parkinson (glp@panix.com)
Date: 09/14/00-06:56:32 AM Z
At 12:05 PM +0100 9/14/00, Rod Fleming wrote:
>[....]
>A sexual response to the naked person, on the part of the artist, and if the
>artist is any good at all, the viewer, is legitimate, indeed essential. The
>attempt to deny this is daft. Art is not cool, cerebral, refined, the stuff
>of parlour parties where no one sweats and God forbid anyone should fart-
>art is life, and that is sex, blood, pain, toil, love, birth, death, joy.
>Attempt to deny part and you miss the point of the whole.
Rod - all of what you write makes sense. Personally, I don't think the issue
is that artists will have human emotional responses to their subjects.
The issue is that it has appeared for a long time that the only people
who were doing the responding were men, and the people causing
the responses were attractive naked women in submissive poses.
I think you can see why women, when looking at art, could become
annoyed with the whole thing.
Things are changing. There are still lots of issues but they are more
complex and (for me) center around basic questions of objectification,
power, and trying to look clearly at what sorts of depictions of
people are not considered acceptable/normal/interesting and why.
All that said, an ad featuring a photo of nude men and clothed women
still has the power to make the vast majority of people stop and look
and form _some_ opinion.
Greg
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