Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

physical pleasure, some type of instant gratification, which is superficial and contains no
underlying, redemptive artistic or moral figuration. Hence, its goal is different from the
traditional goal of art, which aims to provide pleasure through intellectual contemplation.
Traditionally, pornographic material has been excluded from high canonical works and
confined to popular culture, yet it is specifically when pornography is incorporated into
high cultural productions that it reveals its subversive potential; pornography is
potentially transgressive, but like any type of transgression it does not act subversively
when its appearance is expected or predictable. Arguing that “Art is defined against
pornography, while also partaking of it (62),” Julius maintains Manet’s Olympia is the
perfect illustration of the incorporation of the pornographic into high art, of the
transgressive exchanges between high and low culture, and that, by doing so, Manet’s
painting both shocked its audience and subverted art’s established practices: “Olympia
was an affront both to the art canon and to the aesthetic sensibilities of its Paris
audiences.” He also notes that Bataille observed that “it was the first masterpiece …
before which the crowd fairly lost control of itself” and that “[t]his response gave it the
impact of a radical break in art history” (59). Hence, Olympia is also an appropriate
example to demonstrate the interrelationship between shock and subversion; how the
element of shock produced by an artwork can act subversively to shape artistic canons by
defining a new aesthetic.
In the case of western literature, a number of prominent works have incorporated
elements of pornography throughout the ages—from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria to Chaucer’s Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Rabelais’ Gargantua and
Pantagruel—but perhaps none have transgressed the boundaries between pornography
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