Art in CM: locked penis images & freedom

Stockhausen was taken out of context and misunderstood when he called the 9/11/2001 attack the greatest work of art possible, but echoing Bataille, the giving up of genital sex is pretty powerful.

 

Oh.

So, translation: "an act of will enables the viewer to engage with the underlying kiny urges and temporarily experience them."

I think that may be true, though only with kinks built from exaggerated normal human urges. Most people are probably a tiny bit submissive, so can tune into the submissive experience. Part of the experiences is heightened arousal through deferred gratification... most people can identify with that even if they are not submissive.

In other words people can usually identify with one or both dimensions of a fantasy. Thus gay porn can be arousing for straight people who are a tiny bit bi, and/or because it shows people doing sensual intimate stuff and the genders don't matter as much as people think.

However, I would doubt it'd true with respect to scat or balloon fetishes.

 

Hang on! You've shifted from looking at the "art" from the outside, to stepping from inside to the outside to sanity check. That last certainly requires an act of will.

I think this not a symmetrical process.

Outsiders can't empathise with every flavour of insiders, regardless of will. If you are straight, you can't make yourself feel gay, even if you might be able to tune into some of the experiences.

Insiders, however, can step outside to detect abuse.

 

I think this an example of how not knowing that you are a bisexual malesub makes you vulnerable to bad people who will violate your identity.

I think this shows us there are three entities in our discussion:

The Inside - hard wired, fixed, but not necessarily predominant in a personality (e.g. switches)
The Expression - How the inside is expressed/exploited. Could be anything from Medieval Monasticism, through weird Cults to actual healthy BDSM. Inside and Expression form a feedback loop.
The Outside - The position from which we see all of the above in a wider perspective.

 

Oh my - don't want to fool around too much, as this definetely is a new and strange kind of topic (and I really love that)... but still:
Being a beer-drinker (which is not an art when living in Bavaria) I often enjoy reading wine-descriptions just for the language, the ornate characterizations and all that ... as it never fails to make me grin!

And I have to admit: same here!

As I'm not a native speaker, the easiest way to find a first line is Wiki - and they put down:
"Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts (artworks), expressing the author's imaginative, conceptual ideas, or technical skill..."

So taking a pic of someone's penis might prove some technical skill (less in today's mobile-phone-world than in the beginning of the age of daguerreotyping) - but I surely would be more impressed if someone would paint me in my cage in watercolors!
If someone who is the (more or less) proud owner of (more or less again ) a penis - I don't see him (it usually should be a "him") being imaginative?!

And to admit once more: I didn't take the time to really fight myself through the works of Kant, Hegel and Netflix (simply couldn't avoid that one! ), but being a music-addict I like to show you this:


And to end this: Really not meant bad, please carry on - I just needed to soothe my poor brain!

 

Agreed with 2 further tweaks:

• The inside hard wired is equivalent to The Thing In Itself. Not fully known. The real driver of the expression.
• The Expression: never fully exhausts the Thing In Itself-that is one never knows (can never know) everything about oneself, and sometimes bends under pressure from the Thing Itself
• The Outside: can be the site of further self knowledge not yet expressed.

 

Call them "Outside", "Articulation", "Thing Itself".

And you think the Thing Itself is socially shaped. (Not so much the Death of the Author as the Death of the Kinkster.)

So for you there's a feedback loop: Outside > Thing Itself > Articulation > (Outside)

I think I disagree with this, because it seems to assume a Blank Slate, but the evidence increasingly suggests that kinky urges are innate:

Countless reddit threads suggest that kinksters often discover kink on their own (e.g. looking at pictures of old prisons) - "found kink", if you like - and are relieved to encounter it as a cultural form.

And some researchers are now applying the same model to kink as they do to homosexuality;

1) Early Encounters:
2) Exploration with Self:
3) Evaluation:
4) Finding Others:
5) Exploration with Others: ​

I will, however, grant that the curation process, in which you pick urges to feed may be socially determined.

Outside <> Curation Process <> Thing Itself <> Articulation <> (Outside)

If you are turned on by a thing, it probably pings your innate nature.

 

I think that freedom is still there!

Stepping outside your philosophical terms for a moment:

I think it's a grave (because consequences) to assume that our innate nature sums to a single position or sweetspot. Rather, I think we are built of parallel drives, often in conflict, and often context dependent (that last chimes with your social construct angle). Thus the drive to be free and the drive to submit exist independently of each other, as does the buzz of masochism and the aversion to pain or discomfort.

You - or some part of you - gets to chose which drives are suppressed or sublimated, which are satisfied through play or fantasy, and which are lived. Freedom is more important than submission? That's fine, be free, or ringfence your submission.

Having submissive urges doesn't make you A Submissive if you primarily prefer vanilla sex, any more than fancying men makes you Gay if your relationships are all straight. Discovered drives are additional to what you already know, not secret true selves. However, knowing those drives are there is useful in case they are pinged by situations and people.

So, if - for example - one happened to be turned on by chastity fantasies and that challenged both one's sense of autonomy and one's vanilla identity, then the best provisional attitude to take would be: how lovely, a new flavour to explore, in addition to the cuisine I generally prefer.

 

Careful fellas; we're edging close to turning this from a discussion of what art is to a conversation regarding the nature of free will.

 

Art has to be determined by referring to the perspective of the viewer. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and all that. While an artist is free to set up and enforce his or her own narrative upon the work they create, art is ultimately 'unfinished' without the viewer. They bring their own unique points of view (shaped by a myriad of sources) to interpret the work through their own filters. The fact that art can be created without an artist (such as a cloud or a sunset or a stack of locked penises) shows that the role of the viewer is paramount in determining what "is" art.

Having said that, I think the concepts that have been under discussion (freedom, hard-wired or chosen perspective, etc.) are largely a matter of interpretation in and of themselves. The whole concept of 'hard-wired' or 'freely chosen' has echos to me of 'nature vs. nurture'; a quandary that may not have any clear-cut resolution. But simply saying "it's a matter of taste" is akin to throwing ones arms up in the air and trying to paper over the whole sloppy mess.

All of which means that while there may not be any single reason behind the choices made, it's still worthwhile to examine our reasoning, even if we wind up staring so closely we can't see the forest for the trees. It's what we learn on the way that makes the effort valuable (and valid).

 

I don't think it can be a binary choice; nature may be 'more or less' the same in all of us to some degree, but 'nurture' will vary with every individual. Your hypothetical visitor was originally conditioned to be repulsed by nudity as part of her social upbringing; to what extent she overcame that by nature (being attracted to nudity) or through further nurturing (expansion of boundaries by exposure to more of the world at large) is probably impossible to say.

Certainly insofar as art has a 'function' (or at least, one of them), it is to share differing ideas and opinions to open one's mind to alternative ways of thinking ("Free your mind" as Morpheus says in The Matrix). But even here, the question is, was our young visitor able to change her mind as a result of more awareness, or was she just following popular opinion in the ever-changing dance to capture the zeitgeist? Certainly it's the combination of the two that grind us 'forward' (or occasionally backwards, as well).

 

Certainly, she could have been the tipping point in moving public opinion towards favouring an image once seen as shocking (and still shocks today). But as I suggested before, any one of a number of things could have happened in her mind to change her point of view regarding it. As we know we now exist in a Universe governed by quantum fluctuations, I don't know if we can pin down the turning point of our young visitor's opinion. Certainly not without at least asking her for some clue.

 

The title
Art in CM: locked penis images

the thread contains many a quote from, and reference to, all manner of people

discussing differing views of 'Art' and what it is or might be percieved to be

I thought I'd take a slightly different standpoint.

Most people will be familiar with Fetlife a site which has a plentiful supply great many photographs of many things but mostly the human body.

Some of said pictures are snapshots of a moment or scene sometimes including shots of the penis some locked in a variety of chastity devices and I would give the quality of even the best quality of such pictures no more credit than that, simply snapshots, when compared to;

Photgraphs of various created or contrived images taken with factors like situation pose and lighting etc by people who have given thought to and striven for a particular result. Photography as an art form., depicting art that could be appreciated as such regsardless of the actual subject.

I can not in all honesty say I have ever seen an image of a penis in a chastity device that I thought was any more artful than images portraying furniture in the average mail-order catalogue

 

@filltee Is this art?



The answer to that question tells us more about the viewer than the object itself.