WDK exclaimed:
>Is this thread ever "off-topic"!
oh just go with the flow. who cares?!
>That's not a statement of theory, try as I might I can't come up with a
>theory of art; it just works that way. Take Playboy: they spend nearly
>as much on their "pictorials" as the Catholic Church spent beautifying
>the Sistine Chapel, but despite their effort and resources, you're lucky
>if there's even one artistically memorable picture in a year of
>Playboys. Sure, the tightly delimited subject matter is deadening, but
>it still doesn't explain such total artistic failure.
so, there's no guarantee that the 'natural' object of art--the human body--will produce 'art'?
> There are other
>narrow genres, science fiction and detective stories for example, where,
>despite the despotism of editors and consumers, art sneaks through.
hello? now we're working with a pretty elitist conception of art, ey?
>Well, if Analog, while trying to publish space opera, accidentaly
>engendered some artworks, how can so many figure photographers working
>so diligently fail so consistently to do so? It's a dismal mystery.
how 'bout context? how 'bout that it is Playboy and that this shapes your and other's understanding of what constitutes art. Say, anyone read the Harper's piece on the Clio's and adverts as art. knowing a few folks in the biz, i'll have to say that they think of themselves as artists sometimes. and sometimes the entire tradtion of their 'art' --it's conventions, language, insider jokes, etc, take precedence *prior to* any demands on the part of the advertiser who hired the agency--always a source of tension between agency and advertiser.. well hell you only have to watch a few seasons worth of bewitched to get that one!
>I was comparing that SI issue to art, and that's the weird thing - I see
>at least a half dozen photos and maybe more that succeed as art photos.
>If one of those photos worked, that could just be a coincidence, but a
>half-dozen? wow! This never happens with with magazine girlie-photos.
>So I got me two copies, at $5.95 a pop.
oh well my son has it in a special covering and very nearly freaked out the evening we bought as the sprinklers kicked on and got a smidge of water on the cover. heaven forbid!
but oh geez WDK, but you really ought to take a look at some cosmos and the like, vogue even. you will find plenty of beautiful pics and some even nakeder and more provacative than what you found in SI. honest.
>As good as it turned out this year it's still locked in a rigid genre,
>and if those suckers are going to run their stuff through such a tight
>band-pass filter regarding the exposure of nippies and fuzzies, I'll
>continue to ridicule them with kiddie words.
the worst of the rigidity were the pics in the last part--all those wild looking hungrily ravenous grrrls with messed up hair and jutting hips.
>What list is that? Maybe I can subscribe and finally find myself the
>proper word. "Cock"'s no good, I have a deficiently bulgy self-image.
>Cocks crow aloud, loud, you know.
precisely.
but i was also getting at the fact that in the genre of the porn and xx literature, it is the word of choice. maybe we need to take a statistically representative sample, scan it, feed it into a 'fuser and do a word count and see?
> What one does with one's cock is
>whirl it around over one's head like a cowboy gunfighter slinging a
>lasso;
exactly.
>that's an OK dirty joke, but I really haven't got one of those.
well i'm at a loss as to how to restore your sense of virility but.....
oh wait, maybe it was self dprecating humor in the interest of positioning yourself to be "just not like other guys...?" heh.
>"Penis" is no good either, a book abstraction, visual inspection
>indicates I have one, but it's numb. "Dick," that lousy word I'm stuck
>using for lack of a better, is also the exact word I generally use to
>indentify shitheels and no-good bastards. The U.S. President when I was
>a teenager was a Dick, imagine what a pun like that does to a guy.
yes, exactly why it's a poor word for public usage.
>Plus any of those words is just one part in three of the whole works,
>where's the one word that describes it all? At least, you can talk
>about a woman's "pussy," which is inclusive.
huh?
> That's hardly an ideal
>word, kinda uncouth maybe, but it's got a nice cross-image in it, did
>you ever pet a cat and hear it purr?
errrrr.....
oh probably.
were you looking for me to share an illustrative account...?
>Is that a typo? I'd think objectifying a woman's body pornographically
>would be eroticizing it -
porn objectifies--turns into an object that has no agency except for someone else.
>super-eroticizing it, I mean, any human body
>has an inherent internal sexual charge to it,
go WDK!
> but porno multiplies that
>charge by ten million and moves it out to the surface for the eyes of
>the viewer. Yeah, and then, practically all guys, me included, get
>sucked right into that image, like stupid fucking robots. However, if
>that was all that was happening, no kidding, I wouldn't have consciously
>bothered to bring that banal response to anybody's attention. You ever
>been a robot? It's educational but not so pleasant.
oh well i can't find the ref right now but it also happens to women. women are more turned on by porn pics of women than they are by pics of men. but really, what's going on there?
>> --all the while deriding your own bodies somehow just not fit for such
>> 'giggly pudeur' yoshie??? analysis please, you're way better at it
>> than i.
>
>But I don't think men, or rather, idealized male images, are, or should
>be, more unfit than women's images. I'd only guess that they wouldn't
>generate enough revenue to justify a special annual men's swimsuit issue
>in SI.
why is that. it's not natural. it's produced that way because men have made the porn. that's all changing by the way, if my perusal through cosmo is any indication: more and more very nekkid pics of men to advertise perfume and the like not as many as women, but many more than ever before. is this a good thing though?
There actually is a market among women customers for sexy male
>pix, across a spectrum from the "Sexiest Men in the World" issue of
>People magazine to downright porno - I'd guess, all in all, maybe a
>hundredth as large as the market in photographic objectifications of
>women's bodies. Now that "hundredth" is a really interesting number,
>for crying out loud, why?
sexism?
>Yeah, that's odd to hear women openly deriding some other woman because
>she doesn't shave her legs or underarms.
no, it's not because women are taught to oppress women and engage in practices that are sexist no less than men are.
First, what in all the world
>is so "gross" about a little translucent fuzz, second, why the Hell
>would they care, and last, why would they tell me, a guy, about it?
oh puh-lease--is it all transluscent. really? well you must meet my rilly rilly dark haired, freckle faced irish friend, jill, who doesn't shave--anywhere!--definitely not transluscent. so?
kelley
"The rest obsequate[d]"