Is it just obscene pornography with no social redeeming value or is it art?
The heated debate over certain types of art is relevant right now because of suggested cuts to the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. I, for one, am a real honest-to-goodness enthusiastic backer of the arts. There’s nothing I enjoy more in my spare time than lugging out a batch of art and staring at it, the result I suppose of being exposed to so much art when I was in school. At least a couple of times each school year the teacher would pack my classmates and me into a bus, take us to a museum and make us stare at hundreds of old paintings.
We were extremely awed by many of these paintings because they featured enormous, naked women with thighs the size of tractor tires lounging around eating fruit.
Evidently hundreds of years ago Europe was terrorized by packs of enormous women (this was before the Nutrisystem diet) eating grapes and peaches, who threatened to destroy the town if someone didn’t do a painting of them.
Some people ask, “Are these paintings art or are they pornography? And what exactly are loins?”
There are many examples of nudity in art. In Michelangelo’s David, the famous artist has David getting ready to fight Goliath, and David isn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. This raises the question, “Why would anyone fight in the nude?” Was it a tactic? Perhaps this explains why Goliath just stood there frozen like a bozo saying, “This guy is naked as a jaybird!” with the result being he got hit by a rock.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, some people think that just about everything is evil and pornographic. For example, one leading anti-pornography activist once mounted a crusade against a Mighty Mouse cartoon. In this cartoon, Mighty Mouse took a whiff of something. The cartoon makers insist it was clearly flower petals, but the crusader was convinced that Mighty Mouse was snorting illegal drugs. As responsible citizens who lack common sense, we have to ask ourselves, “What if this man is right?”
And speaking of cartoon characters, what about Donald Duck going around for decades wearing a shirt but no pants, flashing his loins right in front of Huey, Dewey and Louie, his so-called nephews. Which brings up another question: Do ducks have loins?
To return to the big debate, should the government support all this nakedness in works of art with our hard-earned tax money? The theory being that if taxpayers were allowed to keep their money, they’d just waste it on things they actually want, because frankly the average taxpayer is not an enthusiastic supporter of the arts. The only art some people buy voluntarily has a picture of Bart Simpson on it or little suction cups so they can stick it onto a car window.
My point is that the obscenity-pornography-art issue involves many complex questions, and we owe it to ourselves as responsible Americans to give them some serious thought.
I hope that this column has cleared things up a bit for you. Also, if you have any tips on how to get these suction cups off of my window let me know.
