Where Does Art Draw the Line

Art is not black and white.  It is a spectral topic, ranging from pornography to religious works.  But where is the line drawn?  Where do we differentiate between Art and Obscenity?  Can Art exist in the vicinity of obscenity?

To answer those questions, it must first be decided what Art is.  Webster’s defines Art as “the creation of beautiful or significant things.”  It occurs to some that art is simply whatever you can get away with.  To others, Art is indefinable, without boundaries or rules or regulations; Art is the natural expression of emotion through any and all means.  It could also be said that the arrangement of sugars, phosphate groups, and nitrogen-containing bases that comprise DNA are a form of art.  For all intents and purposes, Art will thus forth be defined as any expression of human emotion through viable media.

The image to the right is of a young woman in a compromising position.  She has no clothes.  Does this image cross the line from an Art to obscenity?  According to the U.S. Supreme Court, something is only obscene if the average person would find it, taken as a whole, overtly sexual and lacking in serious artistic value.

Is it obscene?

It is an artist’s rendering of a pornographic photo.

Is it obscene?

No.  This image is not overtly sexual, sensual, or even slightly arousing.  Yes, it is an unclothed woman, but if that were our basis, we’d have to declare great works like Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as obscene.  There is no difference between the anatomic content of the two images.  And Venus is the world’s whitest woman.

This leads to an understanding of sexual content being an automatic “obscene” label.  Well, that’s not quite right.  Sexual content is not always an appeal to the prurient interest.  Michelangelo depicted the male form in various positions and in various lighting without creating the Art for the purpose of arousing lust.  In the frame The Birth of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Adam’s penis is in clear view.  Now, you’ve got to be pretty darn close to notice this, but it’s there.  Why did Michelangelo paint Adam, a religious figure, without clothing?  Why is Adam nude?  Because the bible said God created Man and Woman, but he didn’t clothe them.  They didn’t clothe themselves.  In fact, Genesis 2:25 states, “…they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”  How can we deem Adam’s penis to be “obscene?”  When Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, “…they knew that they [were] naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  That is the first reference to clothing; of man’s ashamedness at being naked.

When it comes down to it, the zeitgeist defines the ethical and moral standards for art.  If the human body is being idolized and epitomized as it was in Ancient Greece, the statues do not have clothing.  The Barberini Faun is considered a blatant display of homoerotic art.  The widespread legs draw direct attention to the penis, so many 20^th century critics call it one of the most obscene pieces of art in the world.  Now, if most men in Greece were walking around naked, and even the Olympic Games were preformed naked, why would you bother to put clothes on to take a nap?  This Satyr has simply drank too much and found a nice rock to pass out on.  He shifted to a more comfortable position and some artist thought it would be fun to sculpt him.  This does not seem obscene in a more modern respect. 

When pornographic images, such as a naked woman completely covered in tattoos to cover certain areas, are considered an artistic expression of the human body, it becomes obscene.  There is no art in this pseudo-art form.  There are other works out there that display the human body in sensuous way so as to exude human weakness.  It’s often said that the only difference between Art and Pornography is the lighting, but when the content becomes sex for sex’s sake, it crosses the line.