Dove e quando

Talk by Filippo Domaneschi (University of Genoa)

ABSTRACT
Philosophical discussions of pornography typically move along three main tracks: moral and political philosophy, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. Within aesthetics, a recurring question is whether pornography and art can actually overlap. A well-known proposal by Levinson (2005) says they cannot. On his view, pornography is designed to trigger physiological sexual arousal, while art invites attention to form and aesthetic appreciation. If that’s right, the very idea of “pornographic art” looks like a contradiction in terms.

In this talk, I revisit this debate by asking a simple question: how do ordinary people actually think about pornographic artworks? Using an experimental philosophy approach, I present a pilot study testing folk intuitions about whether pornographic content can count as art and whether its producers can be considered artists. The results suggest that people do recognize a category of pornographic art. Strikingly, aesthetic value emerges as both necessary and sufficient for artistic classification. I argue that while the folk concept of art looks cluster-like, the concept of pornographic art behaves differently: as a morally loaded subcategory, it displays a quasi-essentialist structure in which aesthetic value functions as the decisive threshold for artistic status. I conclude by sketching a few possible conceptual, moral, and pragmatic explanations – and by asking colleagues who actually work in aesthetics whether any of this makes sense.