“Paint me like your French girls”

What Makes a Nude Pornography or Art?

There is perhaps no more apparent hypocrisy among the “cultured” members of society than in the veneration of the female nude in the confines of a gilded museum frame, and its abhorrence in a pornographic instagram picture. In fact, often the artificial intelligence system that flags inappropriate content on instagram removes classical paintings of the woman in nude for their “indecency”. 

Through this essay, you will learn how this is a mistake that a machine may make, but a human being can not. The difference between a nude in pornography and a nude in real art, is quite simple to explain. This essay is not about the imperceptible feelings of a “cultured person” digging her heels in to defend Bouguereau but condemn Kardashian. It is about the dual nature of the human being and the ways in which our representations can capture the obscene, or the ideal. 

Art is not Representation

There exists representative art, however, all art is not representative and, in fact, the faithfulness of representation does not make a piece art. Art is also not merely something that is created with paint on a canvas, or charcoal to paper, or a form carved out of a marble, or pigments captured on photo-paper with a camera...although art may be made of such things. In other words, just because a piece is made of a particular medium, does not make it a piece of artwork. 

Artwork is any material creation by a human that tells a story about humanity, without using symbols. When symbols are used to tell a story, that is called writing, because symbols are the primary unit of language. Art may be distinguished from symbols (and language) because the form itself tells the viewer something, regardless what it may symbolise. For example, you would still understand the essence of the story of Cinderella regardless what font it was written in. The story would not change if the font changed. However, if the shape of the lines in the Mona Lisa were to change, or the colours in the ever famous Klimt’s Kiss were to change, then the story would be entirely changed.

The dual nature of a human being: the animal and the spirit

Human beings exist in an exalted state on Earth. We have both an animal nature and an angelic one; we have a material nature and a spiritual one. Consider the mouth as a perfect illustration of this duality of man. The mouth can sing beautiful songs, and recite wonderful and moving poetry, but it can also swear, eat, burp and vomit. The former consists of the spiritual because a song or a poem has no material “proof” of its existence. Any poem that is written down only makes sense because the symbols in the language mean something to us. Whereas the swearing, eating, burping and vomiting are aspects of our material nature. We must do these things because they serve in the basic material functions of the human body. Even swearing can be equated to an animal’s growls and grunts that defend its territory or signal pain. They do not mean things as a poem or a song may mean something.

We may extrapolate this dual nature of the mouth to the whole human body, and in particular the female body. The female body is a very precious thing in the animal kingdom. The proliferation of a species hinges upon the males being able to access and use the female body to impregnate her and have her carry his offspring. In fact, female farm animals are more precious because they can make more livestock for the farmer. When this same treatment is done to human women, we somehow feel discomfort and unease. If I told you a story about a woman being bought and sold for their breeding abilities, it would cause unease and you might even call it obscene. This discomfort is at the core of understanding the whole difference between art and pornography.

Anything that reminds us of the material aspects of human nature that efface the spiritual aspect, is something obscene. For example, when someone talks while eating, it is obscene to us because it reminds us of the human as a body, rather than the human spirit that resides within that body. We do not wish to see a mouth doing what it does for its primary material purpose such as eating, coughing or vomiting. Similarly, we do not wish to see the female body in a way that reminds us of its primary material purpose: sex. 

Aspects of a Nude

In a pornographic nude, the female body proportions are usually incorrect and exaggerated to accentuate sexual features. No one thinks about the woman when they see such a picture; they think mainly about how the body may be consumed. In an artistic nude, however, the female body is not exaggerated and the proportions are more faithful to life. By this I do not mean that they are more faithful to the average frumpy fridge-shaped woman with disturbed hormones, I mean a perfectly formed, natural human woman. 

For example, the width of the rib cage in proportion to the waist, the size of the breasts and where they sit on the torso, the size of the arms and the articulation of the musculature are all accurate in an artistic nude. These proportions are always off in a pornographic nude because the purpose of the pornographic nude is to de-identify the woman as a human being. If the proportions were correct, it would be more challenging to forget she is a person, especially in a photograph or a hyper-realistic painting.

These aberrations in proportion may be challenging for the modern spectator to appreciate because modern “beauty” is simply a pornification of the human body. The Kardashian standard that enlarges the breasts and lips to horrifying proportions, and chisels the nose and cheeks to inhuman aesthetic, is not the woman, it is the trans woman. These proportions and alterations make a woman look pornographic no matter what pose or picture she takes because the exaggeration aspect of the pornographic image is affixed to her always. 

Men who suffer from gendere dysphoria, who attempt to become women through surgical changes, never look like women, they look like pornographic objects. The entire endeavour is an extension of the way that homosexuality is merely a performance of sex for its material pleasures, divorced from its spiritual aspects such as connection, love and procreation. Obscenity is the worship of the material divorced from, and to the exclusion of, the spiritual.

A Lack of Innocence 

In a pornographic nude, the women in the nude lacks innocence. She performs for the camera or for the painter. There is a look in her eyes that she knows what the purpose of the piece is and it is entirely sexual in nature. There is no chance at all that there may be love, that is, a connection with the viewer on any spiritual level other than the physical. An excellent example of this feature of a pornographic image is the painting “Cherry Ripe” by John Everett Millais, which caused a sensation when it was printed. The painting depicts a fully clothed little girl with her hands in her lap, looking up at the viewer with eyes that know too much. The little girl knows the power she has over the viewer, what he may want from her and finally how she may manipulate him to get it. This look is obscene primarily because it highlights the animal aspect of the body while simultaneously effacing the spiritual. For this reason, a picture does not have to be nude to be pornographic. Pornographic images share this lack of innocence in their pictures.

Pornography Exposes the Body, Art Exposes the Spirit

There is a common misconception that simply because something is a photographed nude, it must be pornography and that just because something is a painted nude, it must be art. This is incorrect. What makes a nude pornographic is not the medium of its execution, but rather the execution itself. If the nude separates the material aspect of the female body from its spiritual aspect and puts the material on display, it is, by definition, pornographic. 

What I have described here is something that any person, regardless his level of education or age may recognise. This distinction is impossible for an artificial intelligent machine to make because it is only material in nature and can therefore only recognise the material aspects of the images it evaluates. It sees an exposed breast and does not care if it is on a Botticelli painting or on a instagram hoe prostituting herself online; the machine treats them both the same

The Purpose of the Female Nude

The woman’s personality is not the purpose of the nude. The nude in art, like in pornography, is still about the female body and not the woman in particular. But unlike pornography, the nude in art is not about the body in particular, but about an eternal image that happens to shine through that body. The perfection of the female body in the prime of its youth, is an eternal image of beauty and the eternal object of affection and obsession. One does not write sonnets to porn stars...one writes them to Aphrodite. This is because the porn star is not beautiful, she is sexy, to be consumed and discarded, a mere mortal. Aphrodite lives forever because she is the symbol of beauty, a quality that is eternal, and that each woman may borrow for a short time.

The female nude in art is itself an ekphrastic ode to the eternal spirit of feminine beauty that may embody a woman for a few brief years of her life, until it is taken away and passed on to the next generation. Art captures, not the particular woman, but an eternal concept, which is also called an ideal. The ideal in the female nude is beauty in the female form. Pornography does not capture this eternal quality, it captures only the ephemeral moment of consumption. It is obscene to us because it reminds us of a bodily function, a mortal pleasure, and a mortal end. The female nude in pornography is a corpse, whereas the female nude in art is living symbol, that will live, indeed, forever.

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