Erotic art and pornographic pictures

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 228-240

  Levinson, Jerrold ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950500395     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2005.0009     Document Type: Review

References (5)

1. John Updike, "Can Genitalia Be Beautiful?" review of Egon Schiele exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York Review of Books, December 4, 1997
2. For reflections on the morally worrisome dimension of pornography for consumers of pornography, see my "Sexual Perversity," Monist 86 (2003): 30-54
3. The locus classicus in philosophy on the transparency of photography is Kendall Walton's "Transparent Pictures," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 246-77
4. See his "Pornographic Art," Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 31-45
5. In terms of a formulation offered recently by Dominic Lopes in order to capture what it is to have an aesthetic interest in a photograph, when one consumes a pornographic photograph one is decidedly not appreciating seeing the photographed object through the photograph. (Dominic Lopes, "The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency," Mind 112 [2003]: 433-48.) Rather, one is relishing the sight of the photographed object simpliciter, the better to be aroused by and to fantasize about it. The communicating of that sight by photographic means is not an object of interest at all