art

“Art is the sex of the imagination.”
—George Jean Nathan


He had always liked that statement, although he felt that it was missing the point just a bit. Art is really the foreplay of the imagination. It teases and torments the artist, driving him or her onward, but never reaching consummation. And at the same time, art is the residue of the act of making it—the husk of the creative act. Art is heaven and hell all rolled up in a tangle of joy and frustration and pain and bliss and peace and torment.

He had heard it said that pornography is degrading and demeaning because it reduces its subject to a mere sexual object, stripping away the rich fullness of the person behind the body, and leaving only the suggestion of a sexual act out of context. Art, especially art that deals with human expression, whether overtly sexual or not, is just the opposite of pornography in this respect. Art enlarges the physical object of human form to capture a meaningful expression of the fullness of the human condition. Art takes the simple physical form and finds within it an expression capturing the heart and soul of the subject. Perhaps it is this procreative upsurging of living energy that accounts for the powerful sense of the sexuality of art. Perhaps art is the flirtation, the act, and the artifact, all engaged and entwined in an irreducible compound.