By Annette Fellaxis
Special to YNOT

NEW YORK – When I first began my career as a shock artist, performing in some of the hippest art houses New York has to offer, nothing got the audience’s attention like shoving something up my butt. Fruit was my specialty — strawberries in particular — but just about anything from writing implements to Christmas ornaments worked as a showpiece so long as they weren’t too pointy.

Nowadays, the ubiquity of online porn has rendered once-shocking live sex acts mundane, to the point where even my patented “anal gumball machine” routine draws little from the crowd but yawns. People have become so jaded that if I put anything less than a two-liter soda bottle up my ass (bottom of the bottle first) they’re liable to fall asleep in their chairs.

If I want to get a rise out of people, I’m better off doing a poetry reading peppered with the N-word than making strategic penetrative use of both ends of a banana — which is not only sad, but also unlikely to happen. While I might be a shock artist, I have no desire to replicate the career path of Michael Richards.

Some critics have argued my problem is one of redundancy, that the audience hasn’t so much become desensitized by porn as they have grown weary of watching me insert stuff into my vagina or anus. If so, why did my work rile up crowds all the way from the late 1980s to the rise of the modern adult tube site?

Is it really mere coincidence my own ass-artistry seemed to be less compelling to people around the same time “Buttman” started giving so-called “stretch classes” and encouraging his performers to create artwork by squirting paint from within their rectums? I think not.

I’m not sure if it’s too late to put the porn-genie back in the smut-bottle, but I have to believe if you pornographers could just dial back the weirder ass play a little bit, it would really benefit true ass artists like me.

Besides, just because a woman is willing to let you gape her asshole out to the size of the average sewer pipe and capture video of her innards doesn’t make her an “artist” or you a “film director.” Honestly, at that point you’re just an amateur proctologist, and she’s nothing but a hapless patient who leaves your office with no greater insight into the cause of her irritable bowels than she had when she waddled in.

Don’t confuse me with some sort of moralist, either. This isn’t about me being uncomfortable with dirty sex, or thinking porn is warping people’s minds or turning men into sex criminals. It’s about porn chipping away at my livelihood, plain and simple.

It’s not just me, either. Sex-themed performance artists all around the country are finding it harder and harder to keep the attention of their audiences. Some even have told me they’ve seen people in the crowd watching porn on their smartphones right in the middle of live performances, eschewing the sight of actual genitalia right in front of them for two-dimensional depictions of penetration on a four-inch screen.

Look, it’s hard enough to get people interested in art without having to contend with competition from gonzo pornographers. Shit, if there had been HD video streaming during the early 20^th Century, Pablo Picasso probably would have wound up working at a gas station.

Artists in this country have it even tougher, because to most Americans, “art” means a black light poster with clowns on it, or, if they’re really sophisticated, a Frank Miller graphic novel.

This was the whole reason I went into shock art in the first place. You can’t pay American men enough to get them to go to the Smithsonian, but tell them some random woman will be taking her clothes off and they’ll line up by the dozen with fat wads of bills clutched in each fist. Or that’s the way it was before internet porn took over, at least. Nowadays, they’re probably planning to tear down Scores to put up a no-questions-asked cyber café with private booths, or something.

Anyway, I’m not asking every pornographer out there to stop shooting anal porn or anything like that. I’m just asking you not to put every last pixel of the crap you film out there for free, so women like me can eek out some kind of living putting fresh fruit up our asses.

If that’s too much to ask, maybe you could at least abstain from having porn stars paint with their butts. Technically, I’m pretty sure you’re actionably infringing on my patented technique.

Annette Fellaxis is a painter and performance artist from New York and author of the how-to book No Amount of KY Makes it Easy to Put an Artichoke Up Your Butt.