Chasing Sex

Why is it that it seems people must see sex everywhere, and most particuarly I am talking about in art, be it visual painted art, or the literary arts. It seems that people most always find within hidden messages of carnal desires, homoeroctisim, and the artist trying to release in someway some repressed sexul need that cannot or is not acted out in the acutal real world. It seems that people see every blank canvas or page as a source of releasing some preverbial orgasim. Perhaps it is simply that art has always offered a certain freedom, a way for people to say through hidden message and symbolism things that they know they could not outwardly express, art has always provided the medium to push the boundries, but this does not mean that behind ever painting, or within every word there is some carnality laying in wait.

As I have mentioned before, I am currently taking an online class in the history of Amercian art, and I have been reading the book and as I have mentioned the book is intresting, but there has been more then one occasaion in which some painting or another is artibuted to expressing some sexual meaning behind it. And granted in both paintings, novels and poetry alike their can be found in some caseses som blatannt or even not so blantent inuendou. But that does not mean this must always be the case, and in some cases I feel as if it is not, and that people are just seeing what they want to see, and overeaching. Or perhaps they are not seeing the artists thoughts within but seeing thier own. And this is not just the modern mind, this is not just the sex-obcessed people of today looking back and reading into things, and it is not just the opininon of the author of the book. But rather in most cases it is the author quoting what art critics of the day had to say about the art. It is what men from the same era of the art viewing it in its present not in its past.

At the risk of sounding clique, cannot a cigar simply just be a cigar, most it always be a phalic symbol or some repressed oral fixation. Cannot a painting of a man in a boat on a storm sea just be a painting of a man in a boat upon a stormy sea?

This does leave me with the question, I wonder for the artist, and I gather it would depend upon each individual artist and where they come from, what they are after. What would be worse, to be excelled to a state of genuis becasue the public and the critics have completely misunderstood your work and turned it into something it never was, missing your entire message and thus taking the painting out of your control and transforming into something beyound you. Or to have people understand your work and take it at face vaule, and then judge it as unworthy.

6:13 PM - 4/23/2007 - post comment

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Yeah, and what do you think about people who don't object but simply see sexual humor in everything? Like just a few moments ago, I heard to grown men bursting out in hysterical laughter, because of 'something hard that's six inches long'.

dutchboy - 6:45 AM - 4/25/2007

For though All are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them. ~The Monk

adopt your own virtual pet!