Turtle opened this issue on Nov 19, 2004 ยท 51 posts
nomuse posted Sun, 21 November 2004 at 12:21 AM
Thanks for putting that straight, Tagarack. I had heard similar but is good to put it all on the table again. Of course, PayPal's business needs do not entirely excuse their high-handed way of handling accounts they have decided to drop. But this has moved far beyond PayPal. Renderosity is taking this as an opportune moment to try to move towards the "family-friendly" site they have discussed before. I wish them luck, I consider it a noble experiment, and I do not call it "censorship" as they do not, as yet, control the market. (Whereas if Barnes and Noble bans a book they effectively remove it from every other available shelve in the US!) However...I think it is experiment doomed to failure. Art has always had a large part of the sensual and the body-worshipping, from Noble Achilles in marble to the fleshy nudes of Reubans and on to present day. A community of varied artists we may be but Poser is the central one here. And like it or not Poser has been in the lead of translating pretty girls (or buff boys) into 3d renders. I find trouble finding a line. At what point does an image go from naked to nude, from fetching to fetish, from action to violence (not that we have focused on that of late), from pretty to erotic to pornographic to obscene? We can take out the "obvious" obscenity (aka, what is obscene in the eye of the beholder, or rather, the eye of Renderosity staff), but after that is the subtler affect of the goth chicks and the fairies and the vickies in their temples. If one took all flesh from the galleries you'd be left with a couple of spaceships, cars, and nature scenes (and yet, and yet, machinery can be and is rendered in a way that fetishizing and sexualizes it. All those sleek curves and the little sweat-beads of moisture on the smooth chrome...) And yet, to many people in many communities, one garter belt would throw the entire site into suspicion. So how deep do you cut? And does the community as we know it survive?