Id like to share a quote a book called
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, that i found today really interesting. I have recently come into the argument more more often of the difference between porn and art, and until now i never really looked into it myself. Anyway, the before mentioned quote.
Proper art has the quality of 'stasis' - it stills the heart of the viewer into a state of aesthetic arrest. As Stephen say in the Portrait, "This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony in the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state..."
Meanwhile, improper art has a 'kinetic' quality - it excites rather than stills the mind: "The feelings excited by improper art," Stepen says, "are kinetic - desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts."