On 05/09/2010 05:36 AM, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
At least by local community standards, the event depicted was indeed not pornographic. San Francisco's long history as a home to both artists and people with different takes on sex and gender means that a lot of local art works with sex and gender as key themes. As they mention in their
Just because someone says that their pornography is art doesn't make it so.
I never said otherwise. However, what I am saying in this case as somebody who lives in the neighborhood and walks past their gallery on the way to the store, their claims are entirely credible. By community standards, what they do is not obscene, and it is not pornographic.
As Wikipedia has it, porn is "portrayal of explicit sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual excitement and erotic satisfaction." That means it is by definition impossible to judge whether an image is pornography without understanding the context in which it is made and consumed, because what distinguishes pornography is intent, not content.
As comparison, consider that it may be impossible to tell a frame from a horror movie from a crime scene photo or an illustration from a coroner's textbook or a medical reference. It is reasonable to argue that Wikipedia shouldn't host any horrific images, whatever the context. That's an argument about content. It's also reasonable to argue that we should only host horrific images where there's a clear educational purpose. That's an argument about intent. But they are very different arguments.
People who are condemning particular images based on content alone with no information as to context of production or use are arguing for a standard based on obscenity, not pornography.
William