This is a sample article from Mikey and Mandy's Most Original Porn Emporium.


In 1966 it was illegal in New York to sell a photo showing pubic hair...ya had to buy them under the counter in adult book stores.
By 1970 (post Deep Throat and Screw Magazine) porn was almost mainstream....even hip in some circles.
Come 1998 and the internet swells with dirty pictures of every imaginable sex act.
Then something happened around 2002...otherwise "respectable" photographers around the world started asking their models to spread their legs, insert fancy glass dildos etc. The line between art and porn blurred.
The definition of porn remains slippery. A chief justice once said, "I can't define pornogaphy, but I know it when I see it".
"Community standards" for judging porn had no meaning with the world wide web.
But when wrestling with this question, I always go back to Sharon Mitchell's quote:
"the difference berween porn and art is the lighting"
I thnk that says it all. Now that porn is a form of pop culture..how do you judge? Why bother?
Take a look at these images and you tell me, which are art and which are porn?
I think this argument is soooo 20th century...the people have decided.
Mikey



I take a different view from Mikey’s about the difference between porn and art.
Art is something I admire and feel comfortable with and know, even with a zillion photography classes, I could not do.
Care is taken in the composition, the setting, the girl, the lighting. It’s like saying Ansel Adams took pictures of mountains or Diane Arbus took shots of freaks. No, in all types of art, there is a visceral reaction, something that either touches the human spirit
or makes you want to see it again and again, to discover new things.
Faux-porn art is rampant on the web, but not REAL art. The latter is the rarest of gifts.
Now porn is another thing.
The primary goal of porn is to turn someone on, turn me on in this case, and it doesn’t have to pretend to be something loftier
or better than that. It can be an amateur pic from a swinger’s club, or a staged beautiful nude from Playboy or Vivid
(although the latter is wearing a bit thin on everyone.) Art is moving and perhaps quite erotic; porn is pure fun.
I’ll leave you with my own quote:
“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”
John Fitgerald Kennedy.
That’s why great artists are celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors each year.
Not wannabes or almosts, the real things. Mapplethorpe was not a pornographer, he was an artist who portrayed erotic situations.
I see no true ART in this gallery, but then, that’s just me.
Mandy
I think we've both been looking at too many dirty pictures.
Mikey
(For more about Mikey aka: Michael C Gross, click here.)

We might shed some more light on this subject at Mikey's guide to taking better dirty pictures
and Mikey's favorite 100 photos.
On a different note, read Mandy's article about writing dirty stories.

Porn or Art? You decide.