{"id":5398,"date":"2009-10-06T12:52:28","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T16:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=5398"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:39:18","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:39:18","slug":"art-or-porn-professor%e2%80%99s-book-suggests-distinction-not-always-clear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2009\/10\/art-or-porn-professor%e2%80%99s-book-suggests-distinction-not-always-clear\/","title":{"rendered":"Art or Porn? Professor\u2019s Book Suggests Distinction Not Always Clear"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Kelly<\/a>
Kelly Dennis, associate professor of art and art history. Photo supplied by Kelly Dennis <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Art in its various forms \u2013 from sculpture and painting to photography and, most recently, digital media \u2013 has moved, delighted, and sometimes provoked people. And pornography has been regarded by some as a source of erotic pleasure, while being denounced as offensive or even harmful by others.<\/p>\n

In her book, Art\/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching <\/em>(Berg Publishers, 2009), published earlier this year, associate professor of art history Kelly Dennis explores the realm of art and its relationship to pornography. She looks in depth at how society has conceived of art and pornography in various forms over time \u2013 and how Western culture has come to create and maintain a kind of boundary between the two.<\/p>\n

Dennis sets out not to define what is or is not pornography in Art\/Porn<\/em>, but to examine society\u2019s conflicting discourses on and historical perceptions of art and pornography, looking back as far as ancient times and the Renaissance through to the advent of photography and, ultimately, the Internet age.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy goals were to complicate what I think has become a safe distinction between art and porn \u2013 and the interests that has served,\u201d Dennis says. \u201cI\u2019m less interested in distinguishing art from porn than in why everyone seems to want to distinguish between them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dennis also examines the controversies over imagery \u2013 what has or has not been considered appropriate \u2013 through the ages, considering depictions of class, the female nude, and feminine sexuality from historical and political perspectives.<\/p>\n

Seeing and Touching<\/h3>\n

Central to Dennis\u2019 book is the role of the sense of touch in how people think about art and pornography. Between a work of art \u2013 for instance, a painting or sculpture \u2013 and the beholder, there remains a kind of centuries-old boundary or \u201clong-standing tension\u201d between seeing and touching, says Dennis.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Art\/Porn:<\/a>
Art\/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching, a new book by Kelly Dennis.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pornography, however, challenges that boundary. \u201cPornography indicates \u2026 the absence of a discrete limit between viewer and image, the instability of the distinction between subject and object of representation,\u201d she writes in the introduction to Art\/Porn<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Dennis maintains that this long-standing boundary between viewer and image has routinely been violated over the ages. For example, most people, she says, tend to think of Classical art as beautiful and remote; yet even as far back as Antiquity, viewers of artwork defied the separation between sight and touch. In fact, the first public nude depiction of a woman in Greek art, a sculpture called Aphrodite of Knidos<\/em>, was known to be molested by male viewers throughout the fourth century BC.<\/p>\n

With the arrival of photography in the 19th century, Dennis says, \u201cthe tension between viewer and image became more irresolvable.\u201d Images depicted in photographs could be touched, held in one\u2019s hand, or carried in a wallet \u2013 further \u201cblur[ring] the line between sight and touch.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of the historical argument is that pornography began with photography,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

At the same time, photography made artwork and erotic imagery \u2013 once accessible mainly among the elite \u2013 more readily available within the public sphere.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhotographs could be circulated in a way that a painting or sculpture could not,\u201d Dennis says. \u201cThere was an opening of the audience to seeing. Once it became available to the mass audience, it became \u2018pornographic.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Researching Pornography<\/h3>\n

In conducting research for the book, Dennis consulted a wide range of sources, visiting museums such as the Museum of Sex in New York City, exploring public and private collections internationally, unearthing advertisements and photographic images, sifting through centuries\u2019 worth of artwork, and studying amateur pornography on the Internet.<\/p>\n

Although pornography has ultimately emerged as a scholarly subject, Dennis says \u201cthere\u2019s also been a backlash \u2013 that it\u2019s trivial, that it doesn\u2019t belong in scholarly research or doesn\u2019t deserve to be studied in the classroom.\u201d Even within the discipline of art history, she has observed a certain resistance to studying the topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cPornography is a topic that\u2019s omnipresent, that shouldn\u2019t be as scary as it is or cause the reaction that it does,\u201d she says. \u201cThe book isn\u2019t written to convince anybody that pornography is a good thing; it\u2019s a part of our visual culture and deserves study and analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a new book, Kelly Dennis explores the historical relationship between art and pornography.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[49],"class_list":["post-5398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 00:37:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5398"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36963,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5398\/revisions\/36963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5398"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=5398"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}