November 11th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
My commentary would be superfluous:
And yet lo I am a man, so here I am flapping my fingertips with the commentary anyway. In fact I have spent a lot of time and bashed up a lot of keyboards over the last sixteen years on this blog addressing particulars: posting a particular porn image, analyzing it as art, speculating about what it means. As a matter of editorial policy, ErosBlog (the blog is me!) is pro-porn and 100% coming from the notion that you can’t wedge a playing card between the baskets that “porn” and “art” live in.
Mostly I have only contempt for the conversations about porn that are seeking to disestablish porn from the realm of culture. In the early days of the blog, I would read them and sometimes post derisive responses to them. Nowadays I rarely even read them. I have pushed fifty. I don’t have time. The music analogy is a good one. You don’t like folk music? Don’t listen! But I am not going to engage with your 4,000-word thinkpiece on how folk music should be banned because of its pernicious effects on banjo players and folk festival attendees. Folk music is here to stay and I can only read so many more words before I die. Your attempt to destroy a cultural force that offends you will not be among them.
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November 10th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Nobody defines “hard act to follow” like Rudolf Valentino. This may be why the 1977 biopic Valentino was a flop — who could play him? But Rudolf Nureyev gave it the old college try, and this lobby card and poster art suggests he at least looked the part:
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November 8th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Hiding behind the tiny little potted ferns in the courtyard at the fern bar isn’t really a solid strategy for avoiding male attention. But then again, if that was her ultimate goal, she’d probably not be posing quite like this:
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November 7th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
It never fails. “I’ll just pick the lock” she says. But it’s not the brass-bound wooden trunk full of treasures or antiques that your little band of adventurers and freebooters hopes it is. It’s something else entirely, something squirmy and hungry and horny and slick and lonely and (until about ten seconds ago) firmly bound by cruel magical enchantments. Surprise!
Artwork is called Beware The Mimic by artist Nightglare.
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November 5th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
“So, what happened to your boat?”
“Well, me and my mate, we were fishing, see? And these skinnydipping teenyboppers, they were on some rocks, eh? And, like, singing? Singing really pretty, and they had hooters out to here. We sailed in closer for a better look, but had to stop because the reefs up in there around those rocks looked kinda tricky. But it was OK because the girls swam out, a whole bunch of them, and started climbing up on board like they wanted to party with us. Only, my mate fell asleep, and I did too, and I don’t really know what happened after that. Woke up on the beach with a mouthful of sand. Can’t find him, can’t find the boat, can’t find those girls, can’t even find those fuckin’ rocks!”
The artwork is The Sirens (1874) by Wilhelm Kray. What’s above is the central detail; click for the whole painting in higher resolution. There’s an even larger version from Wikimedia Commons but the colors aren’t as bright/attractive in their photograph of the painting.
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November 4th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
I really like the detail in this lesbian scene by Pablo Picasso of the woman holding her hands over her eyes, as if the whole business is just too embarrassing to be survived with eyes wide open:
Pablo Picasso titled this Scène érotique when he drew it in 1902.
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November 3rd, 2018 -- by Bacchus
This is one of the rare images I publish where provenance makes it more problematic. I think it stands on its own as erotic art, and so I was tempted to just drop it here and leave it as such:
That remains pretty much my plan. In the context where I found it — a 19th-century European geography of the Americas — publishing this nude portrait was, I deem, gratuitous, racist, and colonialist in varying degrees. None of those things is inherent in the artwork, but the more details of provenance I share, the more emphatically that polluted context contaminates what I consider to be a perfectly beautiful engraving. So, in a reversal of my usual practice, I’ve stripped the context and presented just the artwork.
