Word: artful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Within this erotic panorama, there are obviously immense differences. Surface appearances are deceptive. A play in the politest language can be more obscene in essence than a four-letter-word tirade. A sexual embrace depicted with art can be more innocent than a Botticelli Venus. A fully clad model in a TV commercial can exude more sexuality than a nude onstage...
Such classic examples illustrate the classic dilemma: What is pornography and what is outspoken art? Innumerable erotic works, from Ovid's Ars amatoria to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, in time assumed the stature of classics. Innumerable others were denounced as wicked when they first appeared. Yet almost everyone agrees that there is such a thing as pornography and that it is bad. No less an authority than Henry Miller recently denounced pornography as "a leering or lecherous disguise" that has helped make sexuality joyless. On any level of creative intent, it is hard to defend the bulk...
...Prohibition stopped people from drinking. Liberal cliche to the contrary, lust was not invented by the censors." But lust can indeed be helped along by the censor. The outwardly prudish Victorian era produced pornographic literature of unsurpassed richness and ingenuity. In the first five decades of this century, U.S. art and entertainment either were censored or practiced self-censorship. Yet those were decades of titillating sexuality, heavily reinforced by advertising; technically the decencies were observed, but the atmosphere was charged with eroticism from every screen and billboard. It was those teasing decades that prepared the way for the erotic explosion...
That is not the only issue, however. A number of experts are agreed on one point: erotic art often unduly celebrates sexual prowess to the exclusion of such qualities as tenderness, patience, courage, humor or honesty. If sex is universally regarded as the ultimate status symbol, as Playboy and the pornocrats suggest, many responsible adults will wind up feeling cheated, and alienated; at the same time, and ironically, the aim of sex will become mental rather than sensory...
Vandenhaag: Mr. Tynan's idea is apparently that pornography can be good, depending, of course, on the quality of who creates it. Now as I think of art, it is not the experience itself, but a reflection upon experience. As Santayana put it, high art cancels lust. My view would be this: the better the writer, the less effective his writing as "pornography" as you defined it, however sexual his subject...