For OP’s consideration – legitimate works of art, subject to academic study, that are, I suspect (according to their scale of judging things) infinitely worse than the ‘forty chapter dangan ronpa MC crossover child-porn epic’ straw-fic they’re screeching about over here:
120 Days of Sodom (the book)
The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage (Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage) is a novel by the French writer and nobleman Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. Described as both pornographic and erotic, it was written in 1785. It tells the story of four wealthy male libertines who resolve to experience the ultimate sexual gratification in orgies. To do this, they seal themselves away for four months in an inaccessible castle in the heart of the Black Forest, with a harem of 36 victims, mostly male and female teenagers, and engage four female brothel keepers to tell the stories of their lives and adventures. The women’s narratives form an inspiration for the sexual abuse and torture of the victims, which gradually mounts in intensity and ends in their slaughter.
The work went unpublished until the early 20th century. Since then, it has been translated into many languages, including English, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, and German. It remains a highly controversial book, having been banned by some governments due to its explicit nature and themes of sexual violence and extreme cruelty, but remains of significant interest to students and historians.
120 Days of Sodom (the film)
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Italian: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma), titled Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom on English-language prints and commonly referred to as simply Salò, is a 1975 Italian-French horror art film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film is a loose adaptation of the book The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade reset during WWII. The film focuses on four wealthy, corrupt Italian libertines, during WWII in the time of the fascist Republic of Salò (1943–1945). The libertines kidnap eighteen teenagers and subject them to four months of extreme violence, murder, sadism and sexual and mental torture. The film explores the themes of political corruption, murder, abuse of power, sadism, perversion, sexuality and fascism. The story is in four segments, inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Excrement, and the Circle of Blood. The film also contains frequent references to and several discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality, Ezra Pound’s poem The Cantos and Marcel Proust’s novel sequence In Search of Lost Time.
Pink Flamingos is a 1972 American black comedy exploitation crime film directed, written, produced, filmed, and edited by John Waters. It is part of what Waters has labelled the “Trash Trilogy”, which also includes Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). The film stars the countercultural drag queen Divine as a criminal living under the name of Babs Johnson, “the filthiest person alive”. While living in a trailer with Edie (Edith Massey) and Crackers (Danny Mills)—her mother and son respectively—and companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), Divine is confronted by the Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole), a couple of criminals envious of her reputation. The characters engage in several grotesque, bizarre and explicitly crude situations.
Displaying the tagline “An exercise in poor taste”, Pink Flamingos is notorious for its “outrageousness”, nudity, profanity, and “pursuit of frivolity, scatology, sensationology and skewed epistemology.” As it features a “number of increasingly revolting scenes” that centre on exhibitionism, voyeurism, sodomy, masturbation, gluttony, vomiting, rape, incest, murder, cannibalism and foot fetishism, the film is considered a preliminary exponent of abject art. The film has received a warm reception from film critics and the LGBT community, and has become a cult film.
Kids is a 1995 American independent coming-of-age film directed by Larry Clark with a screenplay by Harmony Korine from a screen story by Clark and Jim Lewis. It stars Chloë Sevigny, Leo Fitzpatrick, Justin Pierce, Rosario Dawson, and Jon Abrahams, all in their film debuts. Kids is centered on a day in the life of a group of teenagers in New York City and their hedonistic behavior towards sex and substance abuse (alcohol and other street drugs) during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s. The film generated a massive controversy upon its release in 1995, and caused much public debate over its artistic merit, even receiving an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. It was later released without a rating.
It was championed by some prominent critics, including Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times, who gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4. In his review, he stated “Kids is the kind of movie that needs to be talked about afterward. It doesn’t tell us what it means. Sure, it has a “message,” involving safe sex. But safe sex is not going to civilize these kids, make them into curious, capable citizens. What you realize, thinking about Telly, is that life has given him nothing that interests him, except for sex, drugs and skateboards. His life is a kind of hell, briefly interrupted by orgasms.“ Film critic Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film a “wake-up call to the modern world” about the nature of present-day youth in urban life.
Other critics have labeled it exploitative (in the lascivious sense) as borderline “child pornography”. Korine attributes the negative reaction to Kids to the expectation on the part of audiences that the film would explicitly make moral judgments on the actions of the characters when Korine gave the film no such moral compass
Story of O is an erotic novel published in 1954 by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage, and published in French by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Desclos did not reveal herself as the author for forty years after the initial publication. Desclos claims she wrote the novel as a series of love letters to her lover Jean Paulhan, who had admired the work of the Marquis de Sade. The novel shares with the latter themes such as love, dominance and submission. Story of O is a tale of female submission involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped; her anus is widened by increasingly large plugs; her labium is pierced and her buttocks are branded.
According to New York Times literary critic Eliot Fremont-Smith, “the artistic interest here has precisely to do with the use not only of erotic materials but also erotic methods, the deliberate stimulation of the reader as a part of and means to a total, authentic literary experience”
Whether or not OP or other brains-fried-by-Tumblr individuals like it or not, all of the above products of the human mind are considered cult-classics and very much works of art. All these films and books inspired widespread controversy and attracted the attention of censorship boards the world over, yet now they’re considered essential components of literary and cinema canon, with the book version of 120 Days of Sodom being recently re-published as part of the Penguin Literary Classics collection. Go to the grave mad about it.
Discussion on a given work’s artistic merit is very much an essential component for something that is considered a work of art. Far too bad that what the Tumblr-Twits want – as they’ve proven again and again – isn’t any sort of nuanced discussion on the nature of art and the interaction between art and the viewer / reader, but rather wholesale suppression of content that makes them feel the least bit uncomfortable that they keep obsessively insisting is a Great Danger to Society. The exact same alarmist, moralistic narrative surrounding the above works several decades ago, isn’t that funny?
Also, while we’re at it, what @grumpy-old-fandommom said above also stands. Whether or not they consider their own work or the works they’re engaging with ‘art’ is something wholly at the personal latitude of creators and readers of fan-fiction. For some, fic is very much a form of self-expression. For others, an escapist fantasy, that allows them to get away from the miserable drudgery of daily life. For yet again others, a hedonistic, pleasure-first playground, where they can indulge their fantasies in a safe, controlled environment. No approach is incorrect and no approach is inherent ‘better’ than others, regardless of what the obsessives of Tumblr like to shriek.
areudirty
dededos
origamiaround
ellievsbear
kaledo-art
