Explicit-content megalith Pornhub has thrown its branding, and its money, into a wide variety of extracurricular projects over the years, from raising funds to save the bees to sponsoring scholarships to, now, commissioning an art exhibition at Michele Maccarone’s gallery in Los Angeles. “The Pleasure Principle”—named for Freud’s theory of the driving force guiding us to seek pleasure to satisfy our id’s needs—opens this Saturday to much anticipation amongst the pervy art crowd. The opening will feature live performance art from L.A.’s most risque creators, and the show will display fifty pieces of explicit art from female artists, including the porn industry’s own Annie Sprinkle.
After last year’s exhibition at New York’s Museum of Sex (“STAG: The Illicit Origins of Pornographic Film”), the Maccarone show is Pornhub’s shot at upping their fine art credibility. But are pornography and fine art ready to coexist so easily?
Cultured’s Dean Kissick mused that “Pornography has historically been defined against art, though lately those lines have become blurred,” with “some videos of actual naked performance art practices from the likes of Spencer Tunick” appearing on Pornhub already. “While both art and pornography have grown massively in popularity this century, they occupy opposite positions in the spectrum of cultural status, with art at the top and pornography the bottom,” he continued. “As hardcore pornography moves closer and closer to the mainstream, art might perhaps give it some gravitas and context.”
But then again, it’s not as thought explicit sexual content and fine art are exactly strangers. The Observer’s Helen Holmes wrote, “For centuries, artists, galleries and museums have been consumed with and motivated by capturing human sexuality. Andy Warhol filmed and distributed extensive sex scenes; Marilyn Minter makes photorealist paintings of spiky black public hair, etc. etc.” So the artworks on exhibit—handpicked by the gallery’s namesake and owner, Michele Maccarone and paid for “with minimal interference” by Pornhub—aren’t that far afield after all.
Adult entertainment’s role in our culture shouldn’t be downplayed for the sake of social mores, Maccarone believes. And, as Kissick wrote at Cultured, “Pornography is where new ideas are tried out and where the rest of us can go to find these provocations and watch things go beyond the pale,” wrote Kissick. “Pornography shows us contemporary desires and desires are, by some reckonings, what construct our reality.” What could be more important to art than that?
Maccarone told Bloomberg: “There’s a way you’re supposed to behave in the art world—represent an artist, go to art fairs—but [art] should be anything goes.” In that spirit, she said, “I have a whole thing about the current mode of content-cleansing”—an issue which has hit the porn industry particularly hard in recent years online, as social media platforms and laws continue to pare down tolerance for explicit media in public.
“The Pleasure Principle” opens this Saturday, September 21, at 7:00 p.m. at Maccarone at 300 South Mission Road, Los Angeles. The show will continue through November 23, 2019. Some of the works exhibited will be available for purchase, while others are on loan to the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
