Yesterday's post spurred a couple of great offline conversations regarding the difference between art and pornography - specifically, who gets to decide. Here were our takeaways.

So recently, I had a little fun playing the role of 'subversive' in this political video.




For the most part, those who knew me understood what I was doing. While strangers who stumbled across this video mocked me in the comments as a nutball with a speech impediment.

The point being: the creator gets to decide what their creation is.

You can decide if it's funny. But you can't decide if it was supposed to be. Content can only be judged against the creator's intention.

And that was my point from yesterday. My realization that the ancient artists were indeed trying to mimic sexualized perfection. And with that knowledge, I now judge it as pornography, since that seems to be what they were going for.

As a kid, I was embarrassed to walk through The Art Institute of Chicago.

Because you couldn't turn a corner without a fat naked lady painting or sculpture jumping out at you.

And I remember my teacher saying something about artistic merit, and our evolving perceptions of beauty - and I simply rationalized this as yet another thing I didn't really understand.

But just last week, I learned an artist has decided to re-create the famous Venus de Milo statue (a topless and armless depiction of the Greek goddess Aphrodite), by updating it to our modern-day perceptions of beauty.

Because it turns out, that's what the Venus de Milo was originally designed to be. In fact, it turns out that's what ALL of these naked paintings and sculptures were intended to be.

Not creepy, fat "realistic" depictions of women. But incredibly sexualized depictions of the female form.

So, now I'm not sure why it's art and not pornography?