Art/Porn A History of Seeing and Touching

by Dennis, Kelly

• ISBN13: 9781847880673
• ISBN10: 1847880673
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-15
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

Do we really know pornography when we see it? Pornography is condemned for being "too close" whilst erotica is defended as "leaving room for the imagination." And the art of the nude is treated as something much more special, located even further away from the potential of arousal. Art/Porn argues that these distinctions are based on an age-old antithesis between sight and touch, an antithesis created and maintained for centuries by art criticism. Art has always elicited a struggle between the senses, between something to be viewed and something to be touched, between visual and visceral pleasure. Images compel the senses in ways that are both taboo and intrinsic to art. Contemporary responses to images of the nude embody this longstanding tension. Our fears about the materiality of art when in close proximity to our own bodies exist alongside a regulation of sensory response which dates back to Antiquity. Art/Porn reveals how - from fondling statues in Antiquity to point-and-click Internet pornography - the worlds of art and pornography are much closer than we think.

Author Biography

KELLY DENNIS is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. 

Table of Contents

General introduction

Time And Work Discipline

Sectional Introduction

Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism

The production of possession: Spirits and the multinational corporation in Malaysia

Satanic fields, pleasant mills: work in an Indian steel plant

Peasant time and factory time in Japan

Work Organisation

Sectional Introduction

Scientific Management

Thirty years of making out

Controlling the line

The nuclear everyday

'work' And 'life'

Sectional Introduction

Emerging alienation in production: a Maussian history

Gendered Meanings in Contention

Local Despotism

The enterprise as a community

Yoseba and Ninpudashi: Changing Patterns of Employment on the fringes of the Japanese Economy

Femininity and flexible labor: Fashioning class through gender on the global assembly line

Industrial Development As Telos

Sectional Introduction

Anthropological problems arising from the African Industrial Revolution

Global Disconnect: Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism

Despair

The Poetics of Productivity

Asking for and giving baki

The Working Class?

Sectional Introduction

Bourgeois and proletarians

Perspectives on the politics of class

Class structure in the classic slum

The cultural roots of working class identity in the Bolivian tin mines

Learning to Protest in Japan

Bibliography

Index

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