Pulp Art Reconstructions: Hedonic Philanthropy In Action

Word has reached me from my good friend Dr. Faustus at Erotic Mad Science that yesterday’s post marked the beginning of a series of perhaps 20 posts featuring pulp art reconstructions. The series, which is tagged PAR1 for your viewing convenience, is an example of Dr. Faustus’s views on hedonic philanthropy being put into action: he engaged a variety of erotic artists to recreate classic pulp images, bringing us new versions of old art, versions that make explicit what was previously left to the imagination. As he explains:

The basic idea is that we’re delving into the past of old pulp and comics covers and looking for relevant art for modern artists to… sex up a bit. Or rather, a bit more, given that these covers were pretty racy to begin with.

I’m really looking forward to seeing all the images Faustus has commissioned. To give you an idea how it’s going, here are some side-by-side thumbs of the art in yesterday’s first post from the series. On the left is the vintage art from the cover of an Italian pulp magazine; on the right is the 2015 reconstruction by Netherlands artist Frans Mensink:

If you’re still curious about the purpose behind all of this (and you’ve already followed the hedonic philanthropy link), Dr. Faustus has a page here explaining his project in greater detail:

As part of my project of commissioning and publishing art for Erotic Mad Science, I am setting up a series of commissions in recreating various old pulp covers. I love these things: they were lurid and shameless, an attempt to titillate the mid-twentieth century viewer into buying the magazine for the genre-fiction contents within. Of course, they couldn’t be too lurid – the nudity had to (usually) be implied to keep news dealers from getting in trouble with the local prosecutor – but they went pretty far.

One of the delights of living in the twenty-first century is that we have a medium in which we can really let our respective freak flags fly, and this is one of mine. The objective here is create psuedo-pulp covers that make explicit what might only have been hidden before.

Budding erotic artists, are you paying attention? Dr. Faustus is not just explaining himself at this link, he’s actively recruiting additional artists to work on his project. This is paying work, and by my count, Faustus has more than forty pulp covers that he has not yet assigned to anyone, in addition to the approximately twenty that he’ll be publishing during the remainder of June. Get after it!

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• Making Your Own: The Collected Works
• On Making Your Own, #3: Hedonic Philanthropy
• Announcing: Erotic Mad Science
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Making Your Own: The Collected Works

Now that Dr. Faustus has completed (at least, I believe it’s complete) his epic series on making your own porn, I thought it might be worth trying to correct some of the structural flaws in the blogging format, which is that episodic material is presented to new readers in reverse-order and to existing readers it appears over long periods of time. Thus it’s often worth assembling a link package to tie everything up into one neat package. Accordingly, all seven links:

On Making Your Own, #3: Hedonic Philanthropy

As I write these words, one respectable estimate puts the number of Internet users at two billion globally. That’s a lot of people, and if you make art, some of them will find you,. With numbers like that, there’s philanthropic magic in the math.

About anything you might create, you might think, “Well, it’s a strange thing and maybe not that many people are into it, and of those, not that many people will find it.” And maybe both of those propositions are true. Suppose your thing will only appeal to or give pleasure to one person out of a hundred. And suppose you’re not that easy to find, even if you optimize search terms for people who want to see the sort of thing you’re into, so only one person in 500 who wants to find your art will find it over the entire life of your site or posting or whatever where you present it.

Well, if you assume two billion Internet users worldwide and do the math, what do you find? That there are 40,000 people in the world whose day you’ll brighten up, at least a little. You could almost fill Wrigley Field with smiling folks (which is more than can be said for the baseball team that plays there these days).

Suppose that creating a single work of art costs $200.00, whether in artist’s commission fees, the monetized opportunity cost of your time, or what have you. (And you can do something pretty nice for $200, in my experience.) Divide that $200 by 40,000 people and it works out to half a cent per person. How many other forms of pleasure can you buy for that little? In philanthropic terms that sounds like a tremendous bargain to me.

And it’s yours for the taking…

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