30 Millennia of Erotic Art
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Victoria Charles. 30 Millennia of Erotic Art
Introduction. Erotic art or pornography?
Prehistory and Antiquity
The Middle Ages
The Renaissance
Baroque
The Modern Age
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The term “Erotic Art” is muddied by a miasma of ambiguous terms. Art and pornography, sexuality and sensuality, obscenity and morality, are all involved to such an extent that it seems almost impossible to reach an objective definition, which is not unusual in the history of art. How does one define erotic art?
This much is certain: the depiction of a sexual act alone is not enough to qualify it as erotic art. To identify erotic art just by its content would reduce it to one dimension, just as it is impossible to distinguish art from pornography simply by describing what it depicts. The view that erotic works are created solely for sexual arousal, and so cannot be art, is also erroneous. Does the creative imagination brought to erotic art distinguish it from pornography? Yet pornography is also a product of the imagination – it has to be more than just a depiction of sexual behaviour, or who would buy it? Günter Schmidt states that pornography is “constructed like sexual fantasy and daydreams, just as unreal, megalomaniacal, magical, illogical, and just as stereotypical.” Erotic daydreams are also the subject of erotic art. Those making a choice between art and pornography may have already decided against the former. Pornography is a moralising, defamatory term. What art is to one person is the Devil’s handiwork to another. The mixing of aesthetic with ethical-moralistic questions dooms every clarification process from the start.
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Ancient Greek. Marble, height: 122 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
49. Anonymous, Meleager, copy after a Greek original created by Skopas, c. 340 BCE.
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