Erotic art
covers any artistic work including paintings, sculptures,
photographs, music and writings that is intended to evoke erotic
arousal or that depicts scenes of love-making.
Definition
Some believe defining eroticism may be difficult since perceptions
of what is erotic fluctuate. For example, a voluptuous nude painting
by Peter Paul Rubens could have been considered erotic or
pornographic when it was created for a private patron in the 17th
century. Similarly in the United Kingdom and United States, D. H.
Lawrence's sexually explicit novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was
considered obscene and unfit for publication and circulation in many
nations thirty years after it was completed in 1928, but may now be
part of standard literary school texts in some areas. In a different
context, a sculpture of a phallus in Africa may be considered a
traditional symbol of potency though not overtly erotic.
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Traditional pederastic courtship scene on a 5th c. Athenian black-figure amphora. Munich.A further distinction needs be made between erotic art and pornography, which also depicts scenes of love-making and is intended to evoke erotic arousal, but is by definition not fine art. However, no such objective distinction exists; the (lack of) distinction is sometimes facetiously summed up as "That which I like is erotica; that which you like is pornography." |
Ancient erotica
Among the oldest surviving examples of art are paleolithic cave
paintings and carvings. Among the more common images of animals and
hunting scenes, depictions of human genitalia, thought to be
fertility symbols, may be found. For example, a recently discovered
cave art at Creswell Crags in England, thought to be over 12,000
years old, includes some symbols thought to be stylized versions of
female genitalia. However we have no indication that these were made
for erotic stimulation, it is far more likely that these were
objects used in religious rituals. [1]
The earliest clearly salacious depictions of sexual behavior can be
found on ancient Greek ceramics. Some of them are renowned because
they contain some of the earliest known depictions of same-sex
erotic behavior.
Modern erotica
In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of
producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In 1601
Caravaggio painted the "Love Triumphant," for the collection of the
Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The latter is reputed to have kept it
hidden behind a curtain to show only to his friends, as it was seen
as a blatant celebration of sodomy. The tradition was continued by
other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet,
Balthus, Picasso, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, who served
time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for
offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of
nude young girls, and so on.
However, the Europeans pale before the great erotic artists of the
east. Unencumbered by Christian dogma, Japan, China, India, Persia
and other lands produced copious quantities of art celebrating the
human faculty of love. The works depict love between men and women
as well as same-sex love. In Japan, the erotic art found its
greatest flowering in the medium of the woodblock print.
Legal standards
Gustave Courbet's L’Origine du monde (1866), Musée d'Orsay.Whether
or not an instance of erotic art is obscene depends on the standards
of the community in which it is displayed.
In the United States, the 1973 ruling of the Supreme Court of the
United States in Miller v. California established a three-tiered
test to determine what was obscene - and thus not protected, versus
what was merely erotic and thus protected by the First Amendment.
Delivering the opinion of the court, Chief Justice Warren Burger
wrote, "The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a)
whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community
standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to
the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in
a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the
applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole,
lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
This information and more can be found at WIKIPEDIA