Is It Art, or Is It Pornography?

François Boucher's Mademoiselle O'Murphy is a nude portrait of a 14 year-old Parisian "child courtesan". Painted in 1751, it is one of the most "sexually provocative" images in art. Moralists would argue that it is pornography, but does it objectify the body sexually, or as a composition?

Boucher's priorities are divided. The pornographer in him may want to make a body that's helplessly available. But the painter can't help being excited by its potential as a composition. Each way the body is "objectified" – but in two different and diverging ways.

And when it comes to "objectifying", painting is always an unstable medium. It tends to blur the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. It treats living creatures like objects – and invests objects with life.

Chances are that a contemporary artist making such a painting would have it confiscated by authorities, and be charged with making child pornography, but this work made in the eighteenth century hangs in a German museum, and is considered a masterpiece. Why?

The art of painting, in other words, has its own compulsions. It's not very good at making proper moral distinctions between persons and things. The whole physical world tends to get mixed up, with life circulating though it promiscuously. But painting isn't very good at doing pure pornography either. Its sexual attention is always getting distracted.

This is the key to understanding fine art, which transcends the obvious. One should be able to look at a great painting and derive a myriad of pleasures, from appreciation of the colors, the composition, the brush strokes, the beauty, and whatever else causes the soul to stir. Pornography has no such aspirations, it exists merely to arouse.

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