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From: mat@mtx5a.UUCP (m.terribile)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,net.legal,net.singles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Commission on Pornography -- reply to GWSmith
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Date: Fri, 12-Sep-86 17:01:07 EDT
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Posted: Fri Sep 12 17:01:07 1986
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> Mark Terribile (mtx5b!mark) writes:
> > The dividing line, which you are arguing (I think) cannot be drawn, is
> > the point at which a photographic or cinematic depiction is designed for
> > *nothing* except sexual arousal.  Triggering sexual arousal is not
> > communication in any sense related to the purposes of the Constitution.
> > Or at least it appears that the Supreme Court has held this to be the case.
> 
> Strange. Art, as I would define it, is a selective re-creation of
> reality *designed to create an emotional response*.

Just one of many definitions.  An artist once told me that art had to do with
seeing things in ways that others didn't, and juxtaposing them in ways that
others wouldn't.  I guess that leaves out Rembrandt and much of Michelangelo
and DaVinci ...

> Films designed for *nothing* except the triggering of horror, piety, hatred,
> fear, compassion, laughter - any emotion other than sexual arousal - are
> constitutionally protected speech. I hold with the late Justice Black
> that the Constitution does not endorse such an exception,

And with William O. Douglas.  But not with the other eight Old Men on that
bench.

> and I loathe any interference by the state with something as personal as the
> emotions, including sexual arousal, engendered by whatever art one 
> freely decides to experience. And my intuition is that a society which
> regards sexual arousal as less desirable than horror or fear, and
> forbids works which evoke the former while protecting those which evoke
> the latter two, is *sick*.

What about a society that holds these things as so personal and private
that the community has the right to say that people shall not gratuitously
manipulate the feelings and physical reactions of others?

There is a judgement embedded in this to the effect that most of the works
in question do not constitute Art; that we can tell the difference between
those that do and those that don't, with a small range that *might*; and that
those that do or might are protected.  And that the mere manipulation of these
personal and private feelings does not of itself constitute Art.

Is this where your disagreement lies?
-- 

	from Mole End			Mark Terribile
		(scrape .. dig )	mtx5b!mat
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