It should be a TOS violation to excerpt long passages from Wikipedia ;^)

But these clips save you from having to read a pretty long entry and might help... ever since Phantast brought up the flag I am at loose ends. I am hoping some one can set me somewhat at ease or this thing is going to plague me... I know a definition of art is arbitrary but some how I am driven by the idea that it is possible to construct a passable  definition!

Wikipedia:
In addition to serving as a method of pure creativity and self-expression, the purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically-, religiously-, or philosophically-motivated art, to create a sense of beauty, to explore the nature of perception, for pleasure, or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.

Characteristics of art
There follow some generally accepted characteristics of art:

1. encourages an intuitive understanding rather than a rational understanding, as, for example, with an article in a scientific journal;
2. was created with the intention of evoking such an understanding or an attempt at such an understanding in the audience;
3. was created with no other purpose or function other than to be itself (a radical, "pure art" definition);
4. elusive, in that the work may communicate on many different levels of appreciation;
5. in relation to the above, the piece may offer itself to many different interpretations, or, though it superficially depicts a mundane event or object, invites reflection upon elevated themes;
6. demonstrates a high level of ability or fluency within a medium; this characteristic might be considered a point of contention, since many modern artists (most notably, conceptual artists) do not themselves create the works they conceive, or do not even create the work in a conventional, demonstrative sense;
7. the conferral of a particularly appealing or aesthetically satisfying structure or form upon an original set of unrelated, passive constituents.

Also the following more concise definition from a dictionary:

A human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium or a high quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty.

The way to work ugly art into this is I guess is to extend the term "beauty" to conceptual, intellectual, and emotional beauty as well as aesthetic beauty as in the Wikipedia item.

---

Maybe the best distinction between erotica and pornography is that erotica is whatever gets you off and pornography is whatever gets other people get off    :0)

More seriously, maybe erotica is intended to arouse while pornography is intended to climax. My understand is that in a strip club it is bad form to climax when given a lap dance in the public area leaving me to wonder what the point of it is then!

Or is it that erotica is meant to be stimulating or climax assisting in its absence by creating an evocative mental image and fantasy, it is "art of the past moment", while pornography is intended to stimulate and facilitate climax in its actual presence, it is art of the "present moment"? Can pornography be created without the intention of furthering the pursuit of climax in most of its audience?

 Is the difference between erotica and pornography located with the audience at all? Is it ultimately (community standards aside) mainly a manner of how its creator relates to it? Is it that when an artist attempts to charge their work with the sexual it is erotic work but when the author seeks to devolp sexual visual or literary imagery that may or may not have an aesthetic charge that it is pornograghy?

Is is the pornonogrphic/erotic difference best thought of in terms of intent, function, or social context? Are all of these just too reductive.... it seems it is responsible to attempt some definition given that law and statute are applied nearly everywhere.

---

"Sex is politics" - Gore Vidal

Is it that we only flatter ourselves when we think art is politics while in fact what defines pornography is that it really is politics?