art beat / By Jennifer Savage

I Sing the Body Erotic

(Aug. 6, 2009)  “But why is a big blue dot on a big white canvas an important enough painting to hang in a museum?”

I asked the professor this during a Los Angeles County Museum of Art field trip years ago. My husband was enrolled in art history. I’d tagged along for fun. We stood in front of an exhibit featuring several door-sized canvases left white except for tire-sized circles of color, one spot per canvas. Was it soothing? Somewhat. Was it art? Apparently. But I couldn’t see it. Fortunately, the woman leading our field trip knew her stuff. She explained the context, how the simplicity of design spoke powerfully against the gaudiness of the times, how it illustrated a rebellious reclamation of art’s meaning. Much like punk did for rock, the artist had wrenched Art away from the bloated Elite and delivered it back into the hands of the common People.

DRIP by Erin Whitman at First Street Gallery.

GALLERY >

Given the historical framework, the inclusion of the paintings in one of the city’s premier institutions made sense. Without the background, however, do the paintings still qualify as brilliant? If art is done solely in rebellion, once the revolution is complete, does its worth remain? Likewise, if an artist trades in shock value, what happens when the work ceases to scandalize? Do paintings, sculptures, sketches, photos, music, films need to stand on their own once all external meaning is stripped away?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Which brings me to the Accident Gallery’s current exhibition, the second biannual presentation of Body Erotic. In addition to the aforementioned is-that-art questions, the old ones about the difference between pornography and art arise. Porn-actress-turned-magazine-editor Gloria Leonard explained the difference in two words: “The lighting.”

The United States Supreme Court defined obscenity in its landmark 1973 decision, Miller v. California thus:

Before sexual material can be judged obscene and therefore unprotected by the First Amendment, a judge or jury must determine: 1. That the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest; 2. That the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable law; and 3. That the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political and scientific value.

I’m pretty sure a badly done painting of genitalia is still a badly done painting, but some artists — and here’s when the shock value debate comes into play — equate provocation with talent. And get offended when one disagrees. (“Clearly, you’re a prude,” they say. “Obviously you don’t understand art.”)

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