Art- don't look now

i) How is art distinct from pornography?
ii) Is it possible to regulate 'artistic' media?

i)

A fine line seems to separate art and pornography, at least, to a layman who lacks education and/or his own mind to perceive and conceive ideas. I however, am much aware of the differences and shall try my best to acknowledge their differences and inform you of them at the same time.

I think I speak for the world of artists and people in the know, that art is extremely subjective. Yet however, it is a subject with much integrity and intellect that forces an artist to be aware of the blurring rules but also, to discard them sometimes and create new ones seeking to overwhelm the physical senses, the emotions and the relative thought processes of the audience. Art is viewed with much evaluation as it enlightens and gives insight into the artist's mind, be it at that moment he/she was creating the piece, or a statement of the past and for the present or future.

As I have mentioned in the above, art has rules, albeit translucent and looking almost a little like stained glass. These certain 'rules' of art are namely method, technique and motive. An artist, be it an amateur, to a craftsman, to a fine artist, has these as factors to consider when creating works for himself or for an audience to appreciate. A clear message driven across: across race, language and nationality, should be what an artist aims to achieve ultimately through his arts.

Now we shall move on to an evaluation on pornography. Porn (as pornography is affectionately called as it is so frequently used) to me, is a rude, sometimes vulgar interpretation or play of physical bodies, almost totally void of whatever ‘rules’ govern how art is produced and viewed. One obvious sign is that porn is viewed with much (should I say?) discomfort in public. It pales in comparison in taste and message when compared to art.

How many discrepancies between both art and porn can be distinctively listed, yet both can be subjectively viewed. Therefore, a clear bold line, can be imposed in our minds between both themes, but however thick and far reaching this line may draw across, it is not opaque, it is not saturated, it is, as much as we might ‘despise’ it to be, hazy. Art can be termed or viewed as porn, so as porn can be perceived as art in that sense. Personally, I think, one must be matured, exposed and aware enough to tell them apart and to treat each one with its due respect. Most importantly when viewing anything on display, the audience should make a conscious effort to evaluate and at least attempt to recognize the styles, symbols and skills of an artist, terming the work being evaluated, as art.

ii)

Is it possible to regulate ‘artistic’ media? A question so frequently posed that it is almost useless to argue about it as everything that CAN be said has been said, and everything that CAN be done in our own power, has been done. I have written ‘can’ in upper-case to emphasize and exaggerate that whatever we say and do, are already censored in one way or another. Censorship was and is used as an excuse to ‘protect’ the public from various views. This is vastly unfair and it confines people to a narrow mindset or a vastly biased view on a topic at hand.

In my opinion, it is quite impossible to siphon the ‘good’ art from the ‘bad’ art, but to control the content being viewed by an audience is definitely possible and is frequently carried out. My reasons being firstly, that censorship is controlled, not by the masses but by a board, consisting of a small integrated group of people, who are already by the mere fact of numbers (or the lack of it rather), biased in view. To make matters worse, these censorship boards are usually set up by and made up by members of the government, who seek to protect its citizens from negative views or to promote propaganda. This factor in my opinion is the most major one.

Secondly, is the claim that censorship is trying it’s best to be tailor made to the ‘norm’ of the public. I think that this statement is totally irrelevant as the ‘norm’ changes and evolves everyday. With the current rise in education and technological know-how, one can take the factor of ‘change-of-definition-of-norm’ and multiply that by google, which is ironically, a search engine used to facilitate this sudden, almost sickening increase in public awareness of our environment. Therefore benchmarking a certain group of people, or a certain level in a group of people can be difficult and in most cases very broad, resulting in frustration of specific groups.

The result of censorship or control of artistic media can prove to promote the media in some ways. Take for example Christopher Nevison, which I quote from an article from The Observer, ‘…Nevison became an early exponent of the now common, Benetton-style ploy of publishing his work by drawing attention to its censorship.’ Right, many times, people have made use of the censorship to gain publicity for their works even till today, where in local papers, we see works getting mentioned not by how rave their production is but by how their works portray something that compares to forbidden fruit. The forbidden fruit being deliberately mentioned to show how as humans, we have a craving for the prohibited. Therefore this ‘Benetton-style ploy’ thrusts many works into the spotlight for a different reason than the artist’s own, or are they, like Nevison, using it to their advantage.

In conclusion, ‘artistic’ media can be easily regulated. However the extent and reason of regulation will be difficult to list and address. Art being subjective by its very nature can not, and should not be siphoned, as mentioned earlier, into good and bad. We, as educated humans, capable of thought and highly complex thought processes, should be able to decode, for ourselves at least, what we should or should not be seeing. We however, are not uniform and completely identical in that sense and thus I think that regulation boards will have a lot more work to do if they wish to make more sense of their actions.