How to do Things with Pictures

Pornography and Real Sexuality

Whether or not pornography can be art is a conceptual issue, to do with the incommensurability of their respective uses. That issue depends on either’s performative, on what pornography and art do to their audiences. These pragmatics have an ethical undergrowth, and are best understood in opposition to the moral space of the real—the moral space of real sexuality, and/or of the represented. If introduced in art, the peculiar pictures that we know from pornography do not have their normal, properly pornographic, nor their negative consequences.
“How to do Things With Pictures”. Art, Aesthetics and the Sexual,
University of Kent, Canterbury, 22 May 2009.
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