Notes and Fragments

Why Pornography Can’t Be Art

by Christy Mag Uidhir

W hen cultural pundits, members of Congress, and New York

City mayors exclaim “That’s not art, it’s pornography!” they
mean something quite exclusionary, namely, if pornography, then not art.
Typically, such exclusion gets predicated on some supposed essential
moral or aesthetic value difference between pornography and art that
is controversial at best. The goal of this article isn’t to attack or defend
value-based exclusionary claims but rather to offer a value-neutral option.
I argue that, while pornography and art may be able to share contents
and aims,1 pornography and art are essentially related to contents and
aims in a way that makes it impossible for something to be both por-
nography and art.

I
Responsibly making claims about whether or not something can be
both art and pornography would seem to depend on there being rela-
tively robust notions of both art and pornography to which to appeal.
Such appeals, however, make any exclusionary claim hostage to the
merits and demerits of the particular full-fledged theories of art and
pornography. I adopt a far less troublesome strategy. I merely invoke a
few plausible necessary conditions for something’s being pornography
and for something’s being art, then show that these are mutually exclu-
sive. My argument is as follows:

Philosophy and Literature, © 2009, 33: 193–203

194 Philosophy and Literature

(1) If something is pornography, then that something has the purpose

of sexual arousal (of some audience).
(2) If something is pornography, then that something has the purpose
of sexual arousal and that purpose is manner inspecific.
(3) If something is art, then if that something has a purpose, then
that purpose is manner specific.
(4) If something is art, then if that something has the purpose of
sexual arousal, then that purpose is manner specific.
(5) A purpose cannot be both manner specific and manner inspe-
cific.
(6) Therefore, if something is pornography, then it is not art.
I do not claim that pornography has only the purpose of sexual arousal
or even that the purpose of sexual arousal is primary; nor do I claim
that other purposes of pornography, should it have them, are manner
inspecific. Also, I do not claim that art has a purpose; I claim only that
if art has a purpose, then that purpose is manner specific. Should it
turn out that art is a purposeless enterprise then the exclusion claim
comes free of charge. My argument targets those, like myself, who think
that the pornography/art debate is interesting precisely because both
pornography and art can have the purpose of sexual arousal. The cru-
cial difference, I argue, is that the purpose of sexual arousal is manner
inspecific for pornography but manner specific for art.
Manner specificity I take to be the following: for a purpose to be
manner specific is for a purpose to be essentially constituted both by
an action (or state of affairs) and a manner, such that the purpose is
to perform that action (or bring about that state of affairs) in that par-
ticular manner. Failure to do so constitutes failure to satisfy/fulfill the
purpose, that is, a manner specific purpose is satisfied only if the state
of affairs is brought about in the prescribed manner. For a purpose to
be manner inspecific is just for it not to be manner specific. That is, for
manner inspecific purposes, failure to bring about the state of affairs in
the prescribed manner does not constitute failure to satisfy the purpose.
Note that I am not arguing that manner inspecific purposes lack pre-
scribed manners. I suppose that all or most purposes have prescribed
manners associated with them, and I suppose that, most of the time,
purposes get satisfied in the manner prescribed. The key distinction is
 Christy Mag Uidhir 195

that for manner specific purposes, the prescribed manner is essentially

constitutive of the purpose, and this makes all the difference.
Lastly, I assume that both pornography and art have intentional com-
ponents, that is, both pornography and art are intention-dependent.
Given this, I assume that purpose-talk is talk of intended purposes.
Although value-neutral, my argument remains consistent with claims
about essential value differences between art and pornography—I just
happen to think that there are none.2 I offer those with intuitions about
the mutual exclusivity of art and pornography a refuge from controver-
sial value claims (e.g., the essential immorality of pornography or the
essentail positive aesthetic value of art). For those committed to value
differences, I at least show that the exclusion of pornography from art
is over-determined. Once again, my argument does not appeal to any
purported definition of art or pornography.3 I make no sufficiency claims
about either what it is for something to be pornography or about what
it is for something to be art. I suggest only two exceedingly plausible
necessary conditions. I leave it up to the reader to consider what a
complete account of pornography may be.

II
Prima facie, a necessary condition for something’s being pornography
is the purpose of sexual arousal—that’s what pornography does and
what it is supposed to do, sexually arouse its audience. I assume then
that the purpose of sexual arousal is a substantive necessary condition
for something’s being pornography. To illustrate this, consider the fol-
lowing cases:

(1) A security camera just so happens to record a couple having

sexual intercourse.
(2) In order to study sexual behavior, a psychology department records
a couple having sexual intercourse.

Assume that the video recordings in (1) and (2) are visually indistin-
guishable from prototypical pornography such that absent any informa-
tion about their individual causal histories, we would think them in fact
prototypical pornography. While these recordings may in fact sexually
arouse the viewer, clearly this isn’t a purpose of (1) and (2), so (1) and
(2) aren’t pornography.
196 Philosophy and Literature

Perhaps being pornography is akin to being a garden shovel, in that

the notion of design for a purpose is an essential feature. Garden shovels,
minimally, are objects designed for the purpose of digging holes in
the earth. No matter how well my hand may dig holes, my hand isn’t
a garden shovel. While I can use my hand as I would a garden shovel,
my hand isn’t thereby a garden shovel—my hand is being used as a
garden shovel. Similarly, naturally occurring rock faces may resemble
acts of sexual intercourse and may be sexually arousing in virtue of that
resemblance, but naturally occurring rock faces cannot be pornogra-
phy. Of course, pornography may have additional purposes other than
sexual arousal of its audience, but whatever else pornography may be
and whatever purposes pornography may have, a necessary purpose of
pornography is the sexual arousal of its audience. To be sure, failure
to have sexual arousal as a purpose doesn’t entail failure to sexually
arouse, but failure to have the purpose of sexual arousal does entail
failure to be pornography.

iii
In addition to the purpose of sexual arousal, must pornography be
sexually explicit? The connection between sexual arousal and sexual
explicitness seems purely contingent, that is, it seems purely contingent
whether or not sexually explicitness positively relates (or relates at all)
to sexual arousal. Pornographers then are in the business of sexually
explicit representations insofar as this contingent connection holds. In
fact, some pornography is anything but sexually explicit—pornography
directed at bondage fetishists need not be explicit sexually to arouse
sexually. Consider a world where sexually explicit representations (or
even sexually suggestive ones) sexually arouse no one. This world may
nevertheless contain pornography. To be sure, if imported into our
world, its failure would be unsurprising, but why think that makes it
not pornography? It just so happens that in our world, in the main,
explicit depictions of the act of sex arouse us sexually. It could be the
case, however, that explicit depictions of sexual acts never arouse us
sexually (e.g., those with certain object fetishes: shoes, stuffed animals,
the smell of linoleum). Denying this entails denying that we mean
the same thing by “sexually explicit” in “that anatomy book is sexually
explicit” and “that pornography is sexually explicit” (even though the
former may never arouse its audience sexually and the latter almost
always does). So, while most actual pornography employs the prescribed
 Christy Mag Uidhir 197

manner of depicting sexually explicit representations in order to satisfy

the purpose of sexual arousal, it needn’t. Moreover, even when it does,
it does so manner inspecifically. No particular manner of depiction is
essential to something’s being pornography.
Echoing the above (at least in spirit), Jerrold Levinson argues for the
following distinction between erotic art and pornography, claiming:

. . . pornography makes no credible appeal to viewers to consider the

mode and means of depiction, as opposed merely to what is depicted;
pornography, unlike art of any kind, is wholly transparent in both aim
and effect.4

Should the connection fail between a certain manner and sexual arousal
(e.g., explicit representations of sexual acts and sexual arousal) por-
nographers would turn to a manner re-establishing a connection with
sexual arousal, whatever that manner may be (photos of shoes, swatches
of velvet, early colonial furniture). Pornography doesn’t even require
for its success that the audience recognize, for example, the picture as
a picture of a couple having sex. Not even this minimal recognition of
manner is needed for pornography to satisfy its purpose. The sexual
arousal of the audience simpliciter matters rather than the manner in
which the arousal is brought about. This is precisely what it means to
be manner inspecific.
A problem with Levinson’s view is that he bases pornography’s exclu-
sion from art on reception exclusivity rather than purpose exclusivity.
Levinson claims that pornography “essentially excludes attention to
form/vehicle/medium/manner” while art “essentially involves attention
to form . . . .”5 Levinson’s view entails the dubious claim that pornog-
raphy cannot coherently direct attention to the manner of depiction.
Consider that some pornography (what Levinson calls ‘artful pornog-
raphy’) targets an audience that demands higher production values,
at least some attention to style, coherent and interesting stories, or
minimally, a degradation-free depiction. Levinson’s view entails that
such an audience is “cognitively atypical” (at least for men) and that the
strategy of artful pornography is ‘generally self-defeating’ (likely contrary
to the opinions of its audience). My view entails no such claims. Pace
Levinson, my view allows for pornography to encourage and invite such
reception and attention; I claim only that the success or failure of such atten-
tion and reception essentially contributes nothing toward either a thing’s being
pornography or a thing’s being successful pornography. Broadly construed,
198 Philosophy and Literature

Levinson’s appeals to reception exclusivity entail purpose exclusivity,

but I show that we needn’t hold the art/pornography debate hostage to
the notions of coherent (or proper) objects of attention and methods
of reception as they relate to sexual arousal. My view simply appeals to
the notion of purposes simpliciter. Purposes are either manner specific
or manner inspecific, so “transparency” in this sense entails only that
the manner is not essentially constitutive of pornography, and that is
all that is needed.

IV
Reflect on the difference between Jeff Koons’s artwork Red Butt (a
photograph of Koons having anal sex with his wife) and a similar look-
ing page from Penthouse. Imagine that both have the purpose of sexu-
ally arousing the viewer. Sexual arousal of the viewer simpliciter matters
to Penthouse, but Koons’s Red Butt, at least minimally, requires sexual
arousal largely in virtue of recognizing that Red Butt depicts a sexual
act involving Jeff Koons.6 Should both photographs sexually arouse the
viewer merely due to the woman’s blond hair or her shiny, gold pumps
(or even perhaps due to the lighting), the purpose of the Penthouse
spread would be satisfied, the purpose of Red Butt would not. Part
and parcel of understanding Red Butt is recognizing that it depicts a
sexual act involving Jeff Koons and Cicciolina, his famously attractive
and libidinous then-wife. Failure to do so precludes satisfaction of the
purpose of the work.
The relation between art and pornography is much like the relation
between art and advertising. Advertising’s aim is to get the audience to
purchase or use the featured product or service (or at least to engender
in the audience the disposition to do so). Furthermore, this purpose of
advertising looks to be a paradigmatic example of a manner inspecific
purpose. Some advertisements employ the manner of featuring the
product to demonstrate its value to the purchaser—“Here are Brillo
pads, observe how well they clean your kitchen!” More often than not,
however, the manner employed is wholly unrelated to the product the
consumer is enjoined to purchase—“Observe the scantily clad, sexy
models driving expensive sports cars. Buy Brillo pads!” The advertisers
aren’t deeply mistaken about the relationship of sexy models and sports
cars to the cleaning power of Brillo pads; they merely prescribe a man-
ner they think disposes the audience to buy the product whatever that
product may be. Advertising aims to make the audience more likely to
 Christy Mag Uidhir 199

buy the product simplicter —whether or not the aim gets achieved in the
prescribed way doesn’t matter.
In making the art/advertising distinction, Jerry Fodor makes a similar
claim:

. . . in the ad case, the intention is primarily just that they should have
their effect upon the audience. The reflexive intention (viz. the intention
that the effect be brought about by the audience’s recognition that the
ad is intended to bring it about) is merely secondary.7

A compelling picture emerges from the comparison of pornography

with advertising: both are manner inspecific. Art, however, is manner
specific, or as Fodor argues,

I take the moral to be that the intention that the reflexive condition
be satisfied is primary in the case of an artwork but only secondary in the
case of the ad. In so far as a thing is not primarily intended to satisfy the
reflexive condition, it is not intended to be an artwork. (Fodor, p. 49)

Fodor suggests here that the artist intends the audience to see the work
as intended to have a certain interpretation (or minimally to see the
work as intended to be the sort of thing that has an interpretation),
whereas the advertisers just intend the audience to purchase the product
or service, for some product or service, as chosen by the client (e.g., buy
Brillo or switch to AT&T). The advertisement succeeds only if it gets
the audience to purchase the product or service. An analogous claim
holds for pornography.
Real-world pornographers and advertisers are gainfully employed
insofar as they are adept at figuring out what turns us on both sexually
and as consumers. There could be, however, lucky advertisers and felici-
tous pornographers, successfully satisfying the purpose of advertising
and pornography despite or even contrary to the prescribed manner.
For example, imagine Smith intends for the audience to be disposed to
buy Brillo pads, and she thinks the best way to do this is to demonstrate
to the audience how well Brillo pads clean filthy pots. As it turns out,
no one is in fact so disposed in virtue of this demonstration. Lucky for
Smith, the spokesperson for Brillo looks sufficiently like a certain celeb-
rity, such that the audience, wanting to emulate that celebrity, becomes
disposed to buy Brillo. This advertisement, despite Smith’s best efforts, is
a huge success. Moreover, it very well could be the case that all of Smith’s
advertisements turn out to be wildly successful despite and contrary to
200 Philosophy and Literature

all of the manners Smith prescribes, which let’s further imagine make
no sense whatsoever. Lucky for Smith, her advertisements can succeed
despite her best/worst efforts.
Both literally and figuratively, artists and artworks are not so lucky.
Robert Motherwell’s At Five in the Afternoon would fail were the audience
to link together bullfighting and the Spanish Civil War only because
of some strange photochemical property of the paint. Gabriel Garcia
Lorca’s poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, if it is to count as suc-
cessful, cannot evoke sadness, silence, and loss only in virtue of some
cognitive trick involving how the font looks or perhaps because the sad-
ness felt by the audience is for the wounded bull rather than for Ignacio.
Furthermore, it wouldn’t be implausible to suggest that were a work to
fail in such a way, the work would then also fail to be art. In contrast to
this, one simply could not plausibly maintain that works of advertising
and pornography that similarly fail also then fail to be advertisements
or pornography. Again, I dare not suggest that all there is to being art
is making the manner essentially constitutive. I do claim that, at least
minimally, art is manner specific.

V
Perhaps since the phrase “pornographic art” gets used in an ostensibly
meaningful way, this suggests an extensional overlap of pornography
and art. For this to have any weight, we have to first flesh out a general
framework for something’s being pornographic—what is it for an F to
be a pornographic F ? Is something being both pornography and an F
necessary for its being a pornographic F ? Sufficient? Both? The afore-
mentioned security-camera recording is not pornography, but I suppose
it could be decidedly pornographic (maybe even naturally occurring
rock faces can be pornographic). Likewise, a particularly inept bit of
pornography may be decidedly unpornographic—pornography can be
unpornographic.
Why is “pornographic art” worrisome in the first place? When we
call something “artistic pornography” I doubt we mean that it is both
art and pornography. Rather, to call something “artistic pornography”
is merely to say that the thing is highly aestheticized/stylized pornog-
raphy or pornography with interesting formal features. When we call
something “pornographic art” I suppose that we mean that the artwork
is like pornography, that is, displays characteristics typical of actual-
world pornography—being sexually explicit, indecent, obscene, even
 Christy Mag Uidhir 201

objectifying or degrading. Being informed that the thing I just called

“artistic pornography” is not, in fact, art, isn’t a semantic correction.
Likewise, being informed that the thing I just called “pornographic art”
isn’t pornography isn’t a semantic correction, even though it may well
be the case that typically things that are both pornography and F are
pornographic F s.
To be sure, there are cases of “pornographic F s” in which the object
is both pornography and an F (e.g., “pornographic movies” and “por-
nographic magazines”), but “pornographic art” is not such an example.
Consider the following sentences:
(1) “This pornographic magazine is decidedly unpornographic.”
(2) “This romantic comedy is decidedly unromantic.”

Contrasted with:
(3) “This pornographic art is decidedly unpornographic.”
(4) “This romantic gesture is decidedly unromantic.”
Levinson wants to explain away “pornographic art” in terms of a strong
and a weak sense of “pornographic” (“EAPP,” p. 235), but clearly the
above shows, not a strong and weak sense, but two distinct functions
being performed. Sentences (1) and (2) make sense because the “por-
nographic” and “romantic” perform different functions in the same
sentence—first to indicate what purpose the thing has or what features
the thing was intended to have and second to indicate what (salient)
features the thing in fact has or doesn’t have. Sentences (3) and (4)
are awkward because only the second function is being performed; as
such, they tell us that their respective things both have and do not have
certain features. To be sure, “pornographic art” is a meaningful phrase,
but obviously its natural reading doesn’t suggest extensional overlap.

VI
Imagine that Andres Serrano’s artwork TriumFish (a photograph of
a masturbating, half-nude woman dressed in a nun’s habit) wasn’t well
received by the artworld. Serrano, in desperation for money, could have
sold his photo to Penthouse. While TriumFish could be used by Penthouse
to sexually arouse its readership, this doesn’t make it both art and por-
nography anymore than throwing The Polish Rider onto the fire makes
The Polish Rider both an artwork and kindling, or using The Thinker to
202 Philosophy and Literature

weigh down my hot air balloon makes The Thinker both an artwork
and ballast. For example, Marcel Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken
Arm looks well-suited to be used as a snow shovel precisely because it
physically composed of an actual snow shovel, but this doesn’t make In
Advance of the Broken Arm both an artwork and a snow shovel. Similarly,
Serrano’s TriumFish may be well-suited to be used as pornography because
of its graphic sexual content, but this doesn’t make TriumFish both art
and pornography. This shouldn’t be controversial. Advertisers employ
artworks (e.g., Absolut Vodka) but this doesn’t mean that result is both
an advertisement and an artwork. Artists employ advertisements (e.g.,
Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes), but
this doesn’t mean that the result is both an artwork and an advertise-
ment. Artists may also employ pornography (e.g., Chris Ofili’s The Holy
Virgin Mary), but this doesn’t mean that the result is both an artwork
and pornography.
Finally, my view supports and is supported by basic intuitions and
positions regarding co-location of objects and object/person distinc-
tions. I do not argue for such positions (though they are quite common
in the philosophy of art); I simply want to suggest that those who hold
such views should find my position amicable. For example, consider the
claim that Duchamp’s Fountain is co-located with a urinal but Fountain is
not a urinal. Fountain was designed to rankle art critics while the urinal
was designed to be a receptacle for urine. Jeff Koons’s Moses (1985)
and a Nike poster advertisement featuring NBA star Moses Malone are
co-located, but Moses is not an advertisement for Nike. Koons’s Moses is
a clever bit of appropriationist art while the Nike poster is hackneyed
and lifeless bit of advertising. Let’s imagine an artist, in reaction to my
project, decides to appropriate as art a Penthouse spread. She cleverly
titles this bit of appropriationist art, This is Pornography, and features
this artwork in her gallery exhibition. I think it obvious that This is
Pornography is not both art and pornography but rather an artwork
co-located with a bit of pornography—a work no more metaphysically
troublesome than Duchamp’s Fountain. Furthermore, in virtue of the
particular bit of pornography the artist employed, This is Pornography
may be exceedingly pornographic and may be used to great effect as
pornography, but This Is Pornography is not pornography (though per-
haps a 21st century, inverted version of The Treachery of Images—“Ceci
n’est pas une pornographie ”).
Artists and pornographers attempting to create something that is
both art and pornography, attempt the impossible. Can pornography
 Christy Mag Uidhir 203

be art or can art be pornography? Neither. Of course, I don’t expect my

view to radically alter the public debate or sway congressional commit-
tees and NEA boards, since a pornographic artwork may nevertheless
inherit the problems and worries typically had by pornography, espe-
cially when the art is co-located with a bit of actual pornography. My
view does, however, change the philosophical landscape by providing a
value-neutral exclusion, paving the way for perhaps more apt questions
about the relationship between art and pornography.

Cornell University

I owe special thanks to Wylie Breckenridge for his suggestions, intuitions, and criticisms, especially
on manner specificity, and also to Jerry Fodor, Matthew Kieran, Matti Eklund, Derk Pereboom,
Jonathan Weisberg, and Denis Dutton for comments on earlier drafts.
1.  Matthew Kieran makes this claim in “Pornographic Art,” Philosophy and Literature
25 (2001): 31–45 and in his book Revealing Art: Why Art Matters (London: Routledge,
2005), pp. 151–66.
2.  For an elegant defense of the position that art is value-neutral see Stephen Davies,
“Essential Distinction for Art Theorists,” Art and Essence, ed. Stephen Davies and Ananta
Sukla (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003), pp. 3–16.
3.  Being true that p is a necessary condition on knowing that p. I needn’t have already
worked out a definition of knowledge to get the conclusion if false that p, then one
can’t know that p.
4.  Jerrold Levinson, “Erotic Art,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig
(London: Routledge, 1999). Levinson also claims (wrongly, I think) that necessarily,
pornography is degrading and objectifying.
5.  Levinson, “Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures,” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005):
228–40; hereafter abbreviated “EAPP.”
6.  Note that the point of many of the Made in Heaven photographs is that they are
posed and shot in much the same way as the photos found in Penthouse (ignoring the
difference in scale). See Jeff Koons: Pictures: 1980–2002, ed. Thomas Kellein (New York:
Distributed Art Publishers, 2002), pp. 58–63.
7.  Jerry Fodor, “Déjà vu all over again: How Danto’s Aesthetics Recapitulates the
Philosophy of Mind,” Danto and his Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Blackwell, 1993), p. 49;
Fodor’s italics.