Fuck Decency

I'm more juvenile than brash, for sure, but I'm altogether sick of the FCC. Our national school ma'arms have pushed too successfully. The debate about decency no longer centers around any question about essence—the paring of words, sounds, and images to find if they intrinsically can be necessarily offensive. We have come so far that we find ourselves instead engaged in a subcerebral indexing of stimuli into Soviet categories: "It is permissible, tovarisch!" and "Nyet, forbidden, comrade!" NPR will not say the word "suck." Suck, folks! This is the United States of A-fucking-merica and we can't say suck!

I'm here today to correct a mistake made by Tyler Green, who writes a damned fine and mostly mistake-free art blog. You see, there's an artist named Jeff Koons—perhaps you don't live underground and you've heard the name—and his deal is that he's sort of a prick, and his art schtick mostly involves being really combative and nigh-obsessed with pop iconography. You might've known that, but you might not've known that some time ago he married Cicciolina, an Italian porn star (who went on to become a member of Parliament). So back in '91, Koons and his bride start shooting hardcore porn and selling the prints for a few hundred big ones. That was the 90s for you. Anyhow, Tyler Green alerts us to just such an auction, but buries the link under a "Not Safe For Work" disclaimer.

Whatever Jeff Koons's work isn't—valuable, literate, provocative—it certainly isn't porn:

There you have it. Sexin', folks, right here on a Web site in the United States of America. If your boss is looking over your shoulder, I'd suggest you tell him or her that there are a lot of things wrong with the above image, but human nudity doesn't make that cut. And it certainly is safe for work—it doesn't even meet the SCOTUS "appealing to the prurient interest" litmus for porn. If boss doesn't buy that... scroll down to that Kerry pic. Now that's obscene.