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The Sex Blog Of Record
Saturday, October 5th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Did you see the story last week about the giant (43 feet tall) naked statue of Donald Trump that got installed beside the highway near Las Vegas by some art activists? The artwork is titled “Naked And Obscene.” Some of the usual MAGA suspects are quoted as claiming that the artists are “demons”, that the statue “is designed to incite violence”, and that Trump, if/when reelected, “should jail” everyone involved.
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Sunday, 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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Saturday, February 24th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
There’s apparently been a silly debate going on somewhere just beyond the periphery of my Twitter feed; from what I can gather, some of the usual marching morons attempted to assert that porn is not art, or cannot be art, or some such blathering nuttery of that long-discredited ilk. All I really know or care to know comes via having noted Conner Habib stalwartly engaged in refutations; some stupidities are too wearying, honestly, to even be worth rubber-necking at. Drive on.
I am so utterly convinced that the veil between art and pornography is, if it exists at all, a flimsy thing that’s penetrated more often than the most industrious sex worker in a busy port during Fleet Week, that I can never resist posting so-called “fine art” that checks every box you might care to design on any notional mythical “Porn Identification Checklist”. How about, for example, Paul Gustave Fischer’s Morgentoilette?
No? Still not convinced? Back up, close the door, bend down, and look again, this time through the key hole:
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Monday, December 28th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
This is La Dame Indignée by photographer Robert Doisneau (1948).
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Saturday, June 20th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Art by Angio in Anal Maximum. (It’s possible — but not confirmed — than Angio is another name used by artist Joseph Farrel.)
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Monday, May 13th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
My father, who briefly attended Cal Tech and took Richard Feynman’s freshman physics class, used to marvel at the man’s skill on the bongo drums. But I never knew before today that he was also a fairly talented artist of the female form, and used that skill to illustrate some of the strippers of his acquaintance:
We’re looking at Dancer at Gianonni’s Bar, 1968. From here, with this to accompany it:
He started drawing at the age of 44 in 1962, shortly after developing the visual language for his famous Feynman diagrams, after a series of amicable arguments about art vs. science with his artist-friend Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian – the same friend to whom Feynman’s timeless ode to a flower was in response. Eventually, the two agreed that they’d exchange lessons in art and science on alternate Sundays. Feynman went on to draw – everything from portraits of other prominent physicists and his children to sketches of strippers and very, very many female nudes – until the end of his life.
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Monday, January 21st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Of course it’s for art:
I found it on one of Dr. Faustus’s proliferating Tumblrs, but I failed utterly at finding an original sourcing credit.
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
You may by now have noticed that I’m often very slow to jump on bandwagons and crusades and campaigns of outrage that go careening by us all at Twitter-enhanced speeds. There’s no shortage of the things, so it doesn’t really matter which side (of whatever controversy or cultural struggle) you are on; you can find a bandwagon to fit your taste without any trouble at all, and if you’re internet-plugged-in, plenty of them will find you. I’m not immune to that, but even when the militant controversies are relevant to my interests and to ErosBlog topics-of-interest, I often tend to tune them out.
Why? Well, sometimes it’s because I’m just out of the loop and don’t learn about them until they are all played out already. But often, I’m uncomfortable with the moral subtext of these things, or with the calls to action that accompany them. You can’t participate in an internet conversation of outrage and condemnation and angry social criticism without treading perilously close to the dreaded tropes of Something Must Be Done, There Ought To Be A Law, No Right-Thinking Person Would Associate Themselves With Doings Of That Sort, and Nobody Should View Or Enjoy Morally-Bankrupt Things Like That.
I can’t bear to stand in any of those camps with my voice raised. It’s one thing for me to avert my electronic gaze from an offensive thing, but quite another for me to shout with the mob of voices clamoring for somebody’s silencing. And there’s never been a good internet bandwagon from which the noise of that particular hue and cry was inaudible.
Which is why I don’t mind saying, I found considerable resonance within myself with the following:
The swooning and fainting and so forth about this stuff, the fever, is comical in its preening intensity. There is clearly some kind of competition to determine who is the most scandalized. It reminds me of church, frankly; I don’t do church, either. I have no common cause with perpetually shocked viziers of moral pageantry. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that I am their enemy.
The answer is always more art; the corollary to that is the answer is never less art. If you start to think that less art is the answer, start over. That’s not the side you want to be on. The problem isn’t that people create or enjoy offensive work. The problem is that so many people believe that culture is something other people create, the sole domain of some anonymized other, so they never put their hat in the ring. That even with a computer in your pocket connected to an instantaneous global network, no-one can hear you. When you believe that, really believe it, the devil dances in hell.
You could show me that on a sign carried by a random stranger, and I’d say “Yeah, I’m with that guy.” (And then I’d inevitably be humiliated when he tried to sell you and me some Lyndon LaRouche literature or a wearable Faraday cage or a Birther book.)
So who is “that guy”, this time? Turns out it’s Jerry Holkins, also know as “that Penny Arcade guy, Tycho, who pissed off a lot of people a few years ago over the internet dickwolves dickishness.” The big blockquote is from the blog post (as opposed to the webcomic) where he’s currently weighing in about a controversial video game trailer.
Yeah, you did read that correctly. There’s a culture-fight going on about the trailer for a videogame, yup. The trailer is said to feature battle nuns who die in ugly fashion. Google “rape culture hitman” (or just contemplate those search terms for a moment) if you want the flavor of the debate. Alternatively, if you’re feeling nostalgic, google “grand theft auto prostitutes”. Me? I stayed out of the GTA thing and I’m staying out of this one. Y’all have fun. And don’t forget to make more art.
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Sunday, January 30th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Now THAT is an ominous shadow!
Artwork is by Otis Sweat, I believe.
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
This image comes via The Art Newspaper:
They explain:
A Louvre art restorer came across a stimulating discovery while cleaning a 17th-century canvas by French artist Nicolas Poussin–a fully erect penis hidden by layers of paint. While working on Poussin’s huge canvas Hymenaios Disguised as a Woman During an Offering to Priapus (1634-38), Brazilian conservator Regina Pinto Moreira uncovered the fertility god’s, er, surprise package, which had been concealed by centuries of dirt and paint. Speaking to the São Paulo press, Moreira said she suspects conservative Catholic critics made a later artist cover up the offending member in the 18th century. “They hid the phallus of Priapus. It’s what we call adjustment for modesty, and it’s not uncommon.”
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Saturday, September 19th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
Seeing as Bacchus has recently posted on both witches and art that is rather irreverent toward Catholicism now is probably a good time to offer an illustration of an 1888 work by Albert von Keller, about whose work as an eroticist I’ve blogged about here before. It is the ominously-titled Gothic fantasy Hexenverbrennung, or Witch Burning.
There is plenty of room for shock here, but the thing I find most striking is the expression on the victim’s face.
Not the fear and agony one would expect. Evidence perhaps that ecstasies of martyrdom are not limited to strictly Catholic contexts.
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Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
A painting by Anders Zorn from the first decade of the 20th century:
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Friday, August 14th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
The artwork is, I think, from an Italian fumetti comic, but I confess I took a liberty with the speech bubble:
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Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 -- by Bacchus
You’re doing pretty well as an artist when you can paint a girl in a pool on the street that’s good enough to inspire someone to shuck down and try to join her:
Art is by Julian Beever, an English pavement artist. But the real reason I posted this was to inquire of my fellow recovered Everquest addicts: Doesn’t that pool look a lot like the outside-the-gate entrance to the Qeynos Sewers?
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