Starting from 21 September, Maccarone gallery in Los Angeles is joining effort with arguably the world’s biggest porn resource, Pornhub, in a bid to combine fine art’s dainty nudes and blatant pornographic imagery in an exhibition called “The Pleasure Principle”.
While the objectives of a porn-streaming site sponsoring an art event that promotes “pleasure and sexuality” are quite clear, the gallery’s calculus is not on the surface. Michele Maccarone, the founder and owner of the gallery, is convinced the event, which will flash a whole bunch of art pieces, both on loan and for sale, is perfectly meaningful as it raises questions of misogyny and exploitation.
According to Maccarone, a pro-women show, the expenses of which will be covered by Pornhub, is fully in tune with her gallery’s specialisation:
“I have a whole thing about the current mode of content-cleansing. Art is so market-driven these days, and I’m interested in reclaiming this history of sexuality, specifically female sexuality. It’s something I’m really passionate about”, the gallery owner stressed.
The agreement stipulates that she would choose the art – overall 50 items – while Pornhub would “commission” the show, more specifically, its production and installation, which may cost a fortune:
“There are a couple of artists where the production and installation is really expensive”, Maccarone explains. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own.”
Among the objects on loan are gouaches by Louise Bourgeois, a series of prints by Lynda Benglis, as well as vintage photographs of Bettie Page, while the others will go for sale, with nude art enthusiasts welcome to update collections with, for instance, a $500 vintage photo of pinup diva Bunny Yeager, or an $80,000 collage (acrylic, digital photo, fur, and linoleum) by Kathe Burkhart.
Interactive pieces will also be present, including Karen Finley’s “Sext Me if You Can”, a performance where viewers will be invited to share a saucy experience of sexting Finley for ten minutes, before she turns the content of the messages into paintings.
The event is just the latest on Pornhub’s busy schedule, with the brand’s Vice President Corey Price mentioning “a lot of diverse things” that the company has recently been preoccupied with.
Among a range of projects, the website, which boasted a jaw-dropping 33.5 billion visits in 2018 alone, did a show in collaboration with the Museum of Sex in New York called “STAG: The Illicit Origins of Pornographic Film”.
Per Price, it is critical that Pornhub get involved “culturally” with the brand by developing in multiple, “diverse directions”, although he admitted that the projects they support are not a random choice - “we want it to be part of the conversation of sex and sexuality in the art space”, the senior manager shared, as cited by BNN Bloomberg.