Pornos devolve into a lesser art form

This past weekend, I attended an opening at the Mission Space for a show by a graffiti artist named Bask. One of the pieces, entitled "Meat-Market," featured dozens, if not hundreds, of cut-out pornographic images showing women in all positions. The text of the painting read: "Now hiring for all positions, great exploitation possibilities," "Your daily dose of misogyny," and a sign reading "This could be you" with an arrow pointing to a woman being taken from behind while performing oral sex on a second man and manipulating a third. The painting was also strewn with pop-culture images, from the dollars and cents sign to pink hearts, symbolizing the relationship between love and money and the love for money.

The painting, though meant to shock the viewer, got me thinking about how much pornography has entered pop-culture and academia in a way that would leave the Marquis de Sade either extremely happy or disappointed that his little niche has become an extremely profitable and much-analyzed business. Now, on college campuses across our country, porn isn't just the subject of tittering between frat brothers or something hidden under the mattress in your dorm room. Rather, pornography (or at least courses that analyze pornography as a phenomenon) has entered the classroom, leading to some heated debate as to where a professor's, and therefore a filmmaker's, First Amendment rights end.

The debate started around 1964, when the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart tried to define "hard-core" pornography by saying "I know it when I see it." This sparked a series of tests by the Supreme Court justices of the day, from Justice Stewart's "Casablanca Test" (as an officer in Casablanca during World War II, he had come in contact with much of the locally produced porn) to Justice Brennan's (and I swear I'm not making this up) "Limp Dick Test," whereby any male genitalia couldn't be seen erect, though acts of penetration were acceptable. I'd like to know exactly how this works.

In recent years, there has been a flood in the literary and film world of works pushing the boundaries between what could be considered pornographic. P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights featured the story of Dirk Diggler, a porn star rising to great acclaim just as the video tape was being introduced to the medium. Though darkly satirical, this film shows the relative care once taken to producing pornography; the actors rehearse their lines and cinematographic considerations, such as lighting and sound, are taken into account. At the Charles Theater, a mainstay of indie-films for the Baltimore community, the biopic of Ron Jeremy had a prominent, if not short, run in their main theater. Perhaps the most famous man in the porn industry, the film highlighted the actor as a rather lonely person who wants nothing more than to be accepted.

Take a look at the readings in the November Harper's Magazine. One of the central pieces is an open letter from Parisian pornographer John B. Root, decrying the state of modern pornography. He describes the medium as a "showing of sad hack-work" and the films as "gymnastic performances of moronic misogyny filmed on video by amateurs suffering from Parkinson's."

But how do these descriptions of pornography separate from pornography itself? They show and speak of the act of penetration as if they were displaying it themselves. Is it the self-consciousness of the act, or the critical impact of the statements being made or is it simply that wangers and boobs don't dot the screen in all of their camcordered glory? I had an art history teacher in high school who got frustrated when I couldn't grasp the distinction between "nudity" and "nakedness" when describing Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'herbe." Now, though, I think I'm beginning to understand.

Some conservatives have the view that anything featuring nudity or nakedness is not protected in our First Amendment rights, that little Johnny is going to be hunched over in his bathroom, enjoying the pleasures of Madame Palm and her five lovely daughters while flipping through the pages of an introductory art history text book. My question is: what's so wrong with that? All representation of the human form is erotic at some level, making the separation between art and pornography all the murkier, especially in light of the "Meat Market" painting.

After leaving the Mission Space exhibit, I decided that there was only one sure-fire test in my mind to judge the difference between pornographic and artistic film. I went to my friend Vivienne's apartment, and asked her if she had any porno that the few people I was with could enjoy. She went to her room and brought back her bootleg copy of Black Girls Do it Better, and we spent the next hour (again, I swear) analyzing what makes pornography so wrong.

I came to the conclusion that the limited pornography I saw that night wasn't necessarily wrong, but was definitely just plain bad. Now I understand what Dirk Diggler was talking about when he refused to appear in video porn as opposed to film porn. One thing I will say is that those people who appear in porn appear to be evolutionarily higher than us regular folk; they have an ability to not only maintain an erection but also to "do the deed" in the strangest of conditions and in front of a camera crew.

Thus, while I'm still not sure of the difference between art and pornography, I can generally align pornography with bad films. It's going to take a lot more investigation, though, and I'll be in the bathroom if anyone needs me.