The Popularity of Pornography in Art and Film
Posted at 11:28 PM May 15, 2008
Every Thursday, Naked City expands your pornographic worldview with tales from the far reaches of the earth. Four international pornographers share this space to tell all about the experiences of being porny and making porn outside of the United States.
Here's Jürgen Anger, the founder and curator of the Berlin Porn Film Festival...
When I started the pornfilmfestivalBerlin three years ago I quoted a line from US artist Andres Serrano, who gained notoriety in the 1980s when Senator Jesse Helms fought the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) because of their funding of some "controversial" artists. Serrano was among these with his "Piss-Christ" painting; he once quipped, "The difference between Art and Pornography – Art is more expensive.“
Gaspar Noé, the controversial French filmmaker of "Irréversible" (which has an intense rape scene starring Monica Bellucci), has said that he doesn't think there is a difference between art and pornography. 
Jennifer Allen, a former pole dancer who has made her experiences into a new art form remarks that artworks may be more pricey, but porn is more profitable:
In our fresh century, art and porn have forged a powerful new alliance beyond the traditional nude and the direct quoatation, whether close-up or critical. Both realms have been radically transformed by globalized markets for spectactles and by mobile media technologies, from digital cameras to web cams. If censors once hoped to protect high art lovers from becoming lowly porn fans, distinguishing between the groups makes no sense today. The internet eliminated the physical space that seperated (and segregated) the museum from the porn shop, along with their respective users. While museums and porn shops persist, it’s no longer necessary to visit them to get some art or some porn or a bit of both; all variations can be found on YouTube and MySpace; and anyone can post a new hybrid, write a blog or chat to find collaborators for an indie porn. With Web 2.0, the old elitism of art and the old trashiness of porn fused into a massive user-friendly market with Do it Yourself consumers and producers (or both), who are as proficient with up & downloading as they are well-versed in exhibitionism.
The internet provides private space but young artists nowadays don't want to be private. They are openly pornographic and not ashamed to call their work pornographic and obscene. Panic Qulture, a young Parisian art collective, produces work with names like Pop Porn Party. They have a fresh naiveté and love to deconstruct heterosexual norms. They use pop culture, post porn politics and queerness in their films and live performances and avoid the structures of mainstream porn and the art world.
Our own German Paris Hilton is Charlotte Roche, a former MTV host, who has published a booked called Feuchtgebiete (meaning: "wet areas"), the best selling book in Germany at the moment. Bourgois cultural critics get wet reading about female body fluids. The book is seen as the result of what Elfriede Jelinek, the literature nobel prize winner from Austria, already demanded in the late 80's: that women should recapture the depiction of nudity and obscenity.
But the subversive potential of female pornography has long gone. The confessions of female porn has long reached into mainstream. In the US you have "Sex and the City," Paris Hilton and John and Jane who show their confessions on Youporn.
In my work as a producer I try to create work together with the filmmakers which show a realistic portrait of today's society including sexuality. So all you investors out there please send me money to do new work with Maxime Cervulle, Maria Beatty, Yair Hochner, Ismail Necmi, Bruce laBruce, Ela Troyano and all the others who will come up.
And those who have given all their heartblood and sweat to finish one film please send it to: org@pornfilmfestivalberlin.de
more: Porn At Large
