Serving the Gift: Artists and Their Art
True Art
“All art, good, bad, indifferent, reflects its culture. Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal. Two writers may write the same story about the same man and woman and their relationship with each other. One writer will come up with art and the other with pornography. There is no subject that is not appropriate for the artist, but the way in which it is handled can sometimes be totally inappropriate. True art has a mythic quality in that it speaks of that which was true, is true, and will be true.”
Madeleine speaks a lot about pornographic content in the selections from this book. I’ve always noted whenever she mentions it, however I want to elaborate more on what she means by it. Because a lot of content in today’s art world could be viewed as pornographic where it may not necessarily be so. To start off my musings, I looked up the definition of pornographic. Obviously, I know what the general idea is, but most of the time I find it helps to look up the way a word is described in the dictionary.
As described by Dictionary.com:
n. obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic merit
Upon reading this definition, I was struck by the word artistic. What do we consider art? So…
adj. showing skill or excellence in execution
n. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance
I was struck again by the word beautiful because of a First-Year English class where we discussed the meaning of the word based on an article written by Gene Weingarten called Pearls Before Breakfast published in the Washington Post. I wrote a paper on the article discussing what Weingarten’s take on beauty meant, received an A, and spent the next four years subconsciously pondering the word myself. Beautiful connected a dot in my brain to the word substance, and what people these days accept as art made with substantial material. So, naturally…
n. solid or meaningful quality
In the end, I came to realize that all of these words were circling each other with the common, unspoken theme of another word: opinion. One guy in my First-Year English class made the age-old argument that beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and that Weingarten’s opinion of beauty may not be the same as someone else’s or even a thousand someone else’s. So then I was left to wonder if certain content – oh, I don’t know, let’s just say 50 Shades of Grey, since it’s the most controversial these days – could be considered art, in that case beauty, in that case substantial to some people. I, being one who has not read the series, have heard it argued that 50 Shades has an intriguing, meaningful storyline behind all the odd, creative sex. I was left to wonder if the story would even be believable without it, given its content. Obviously, I can’t argue for or against the books as art or beauty or substance being that I haven’t read them, but I’ve brought it up because I want to know what you think about it. Not necessarily your opinion on 50 Shades, but how you interpret art, beauty, and substance.
I can definitely see Madeleine’s point about art touching on “that which is eternal,” and if I’m being completely honest, I totally agree with her. With that being said, I’ve probably read a few pornographic novels over the years. I mean, I have been known to read a few trashy romance novels, and that will probably continue to be part of the cream of which my crop consists of. I think the hidden question here, though, is time. What should we spend our time ingesting and what does what we ingest say about how we perceive something as art, beauty, and of substance? You could consider something pornographic based on the intention in reading certain books. If you’re looking for a book that gets you hot and bothered because you’re looking to get hot and bothered, that might classify as pornographic intention. I think it also depends on the author’s intention. I mean, romance novelists have to know that some people are buying their books because they want to get hot and bothered, therefore that could be seen as pornographic distribution.
With that being said, a lot of times authors write books, such as romance novels, that may gratify the sex scenes, but in the end the story is still about love. For instance, Catherine Anderson, my go-to author for when I’m in the mood for romance, knows her genre, knows her market, and does not skimp on the steam. However, her stories are about women who are empowered by loving another human being. Does the addition of sex mean that the work is pornographic? Not necessarily. Sex is part of life, was created by God, and intended to be shared between two people who are truly in love with one another. Or, take, for instance the book Lucky by Alice Sebold that tells of the author’s own experience with rape. It’s a horrible, horrible thing, but it happens, and Sebold goes into graphic detail about the horrific night of her violation. I did not consider that book to be pornographic because of the intention behind the book. Sebold did not share that scene in such detail to be crude, she shared that scene in such detail to make people see the gravity of the situation and how it affected her. There’s nothing pornographic about what it means for two people to show they love each other and nothing pornographic for people to speak up about a past travesty. What matters is the intention behind it and how the material is handled.
I wanted to broach this subject because pornographic material is something Madeleine talks about a lot, and seems wholly decided about her feelings on the subject. I think there’s a lot of gray matter to be sifted through here. Obviously we know what out-in-out porn is, but Madeleine seems to have a stronger, stricter take on it – a view that a lot of people today may disagree with, which is why I was curious about what you consider pornographic and what you consider to be art, beauty, and containing substance. For me, art requires inventiveness and originality, not necessarily in content, but in the way that content is executed. Something beautiful for me is highly dependent on thought, intention, creativity, meaning, symbolism, and execution; substance being that which relates to the world in a cosmic way. With that being said, I would consider pornography to be content that mocks these meanings, twisting them into something cruel and crude for the sake of being cruel and crude.
