Mapplethorpe and the new obscenity

Afterimage, March-April, 2003 by Dustin Kidd

[C]lassical theory could not be appealed to with iart after the end of arti precisely because it seemed to scorn aesthetic quality altogether: it was precisely in terms of classical aesthetics that the refusal to call it art was grounded. Once its status as art was established, it was fairly clear that aesthetics as a theory was badly in need of repair if it was to be helpful in dealing with art at all. And in my view that was going to mean overhauling the distinction between the aesthetic and the practical as the default basis of the discipline. (15)

Like Barthes and Durkheim, Danto is highlighting the association of art with the sacred, and its distinction from the mundane. Danto had been seeking a new set of terms by which the art world could debate the question of artistic merit, and specifically a language that was post-formalist. He had already found his foundational case in the example of Andy Warhol's Brillo

Box, but with Mapplethorpe, Danto-had found the case that would demonstrate to the art world the necessity of abandoning formalist aesthetics in favor of a more socially contextualized art criticism, completing the arc of formalismis fall that began with Duchamp and continued with Warhol. At the end of that arc, not only is formalism sufficiently broken, but also replaced; not by a single narrative about art, but by many. In the case of Mapplethorpe's work, the narrative is one of homosexual identity politics. While Duchamp found art within the realm of the mundane, Warhol found art in both the mundane (Brillo Box) and the obscene (see, for instance, the film Flesh), and Mapplethorpe finally entrenched the artistic in the realm of the obscene (Man in Polyester Suit; Jim and Tom, Sausalito; Honey). I do not mean to suggest that no previous artist had experimented with these boundaries, but only to map out the social consequences of specific artists who have done so in the twentieth century.

To close, let us return to the Congressional definition of obscenity, in hopes that this will complete my circling through the legal, social and finally artistic significance of obscenity. That definition specifies that the realm of obscenity does not include those objects and practices that have literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Four very different forms of value are invoked. In practice, the significance of artistic value has given way. Artistic value no longer protects creative works from being attacked on grounds of obscenity. As a result, the art world has been looking to the other categories for protection. Literary value cannot be used because literature is often exposed to the same dilemmas as the visual arts and science is too distant from the contemporary art world to have weight. But politics is already a central dynamic of twentieth-century art. What the art world has done--recognizing that art alone is an insufficient shield--is to protect itself behind the dual shields of art an d politics. In the case of Mapplethorpe, the politics in question is a sexuality-based identity politics.