There’s no clear philosophical distinction between art and porn. Politically, however, we make such distinctions. I don’t see what the big deal is about making a distinction that doesn’t (and can’t) please everyone and sticking to it. I also think we should err on the side of being possibly a little too conservative. I care a hell of a lot more about something like how young girls are viewed by society (and more than a few violent criminals) than I do about some “artist” and his “right” to say and do whatever he pleases, as if he were a spoiled child. Not having seen the photos we’re discussing, I have no idea what I would think of them, so my comments are general ones only. I do think that the art world in general is pretty dissipated though. There’s just too many “artists” out there, all looking for some angle to call their own.
I’d be willing to bet that Euclid was good at math… What we know that others struggle with we tend to appreciate, and value highly… I am still working on one is one, and I find language is better at telling the truth, at least for the real questions that plague mankind…We have mastered our physical needs, and now only moral needs confront us… If I would define art it would be as subject, and if some one chooses a subject that cause more pain than pleasure it is not art, but crime… People do not need to be reminded of their pain, but should be encouraged to grow through it…
except he existed in non-euclidean space
-Imp
Unless we personify Nature and call her an artist, not all that is beautiful is necessarily art. This was what made me edit my first post in this thread. Following Nietzsche, I say art must follow from Rausch (“intoxication/frenzy/rapture”). But what is Rausch? According to Nietzsche, “What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness.” [Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man”, 8.] The essence of Rausch, then, is the feeling of power—that is, the feeling of an increase in power. From other things Nietzsche wrote, I infer that it is a sudden increase of power, a leap in the feeling of power. This is what artists call “inspiration”. Having started my philosophical career as a lyric poet, I know it from experience. Back then I didn’t see it in this light, though. Anyway, there must be more to artistic creation than ‘inspiration’ (Rausch), or otherwise we must also call the sexual act an act of artistic creation. Although… According to Freud, genital-centered sexuality is not natural; it is a neurotic repression of the original, polymorphously perverse playful ‘sexuality’ (sensuality) of the infant. This natural sexuality is only re-attained by the ‘totalitarian’ artist:
[size=95]The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which focus on narrower inlets of sensation.
[Jim Morrison, The Lords.][/size]
I have only experienced this in freestyle dancing (in the nude, by the way) combined with freestyle chanting.—Anyway, perhaps art is play—mature play. This would also explain why professional art is either a dream job or an error or lie. True art cannot consider commerce (unless it be—the art of commerce…). True art is monological: the artist has forgotten the world, unless it be his material… True art is childlike, self-absorbed play.
Meh cantor and Rici and Schrödinger were better.
i think therefore i exists and is parallel to the other dimensions.
Dirac was quite clever at maths too.
No he didn’t he existed in Euclidean space, the clue is in the name. 
Sauwelios,
I keep coming back to check this thread because I have had the nagging feeling that I wanted to say more than I did. This is something I would have liked to say, and would have loved to think on my own.
I have often thought about myself as both an artist and a work of art, an idea I’ve picked up from several sources - from Nietzsche (who probably got it from someone else) to Marilyn Manson (who probably got it from Nietzsche). I very consciously try to shape myself, of course within the tight limits of culture, to be what I think is “better.” I am my work and I am my medium. Here is something short I wrote awhile ago when I stumbled upon the idea of life as art:
[i]i feel attached to this situation, to “my life.” not sentimentally attached, but tied down. i don’t want to be a “product” of my life. i don’t want to do the same things over and over and i don’t want to just react. i think this is what disillusioned middle-age must be like. wanting other things in life, yet feeling resigned to your current family, job, friends, lifestyle – things that pull from you your energy to create and leave you feeling tired and reluctant about life.
i’ve read it in books and even in song lyrics the idea that a person is an artist and a work of art. you are your medium. make of it what you will. when i think about things this way i feel like i get why some people dress differently, absurdly, or wear ridiculous make-up or get tattoos and piercings or walk with character or do those creative things that no one appreciates in the same way that they themselves do. they are artists. and they are performance art.
i don’t think everyone is an artist.[/i]
But when Morrison talks about reconnecting with the “stream of life” (is this the same idea as flow in psychology?) and you talk about true art as play, this, too, makes a great deal of sense to me, and the idea of life as art seems suddenly superficial. Hm. Could one both live in constant total immersion (“stream of life”) and do philosophy?
fuse
right… 
-Imp
I’m not sure what “flow” is in psychology: do you mean stream of consciousness? I think what Morrison says relates to what Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy: the (temporary) release from cultural boundaries, the tearing of the veil of illusion (the illusion of individuality, of separateness from the rest of the cosmic process),—the Dionysian.
Could one live totally Dionysian? I think not. Morrison tried to be as Dionysian as possible, and it killed him at 27. Total Dionysianism would be instant disintegration:
[size=95]Every living being, and especially man, is surrounded, oppressed, and penetrated by chaos, the unmastered, overpowering element that tears everything away in its stream. Thus it might seem that precisely the vitality of life as this pure streaming of drives and pulsions, proclivities and inclinations, needs and demands, impressions and views, wishes and commands pulls and sucks the living itself into its own stream, there to exhaust its surge and flow. Life would then be sheer dissolution and annihilation.
However, “life” is the name for Being, and Being means presencing, subsistence, permanence, withstanding disappearance and atrophy. If life therefore is this chaotic bodying and oppressive urging, if it is supposed to be what properly is, it must at the same time and just as originally be the concern of the living to withstand the urge and the excessive urge, lest this urge propel toward mere annihilation. This cannot happen because the urge would thus remove itself and hence could never be an urge. In the essence of this excessive urge lies a kind of urge that is suited to its nature, that urges life not to submit to the urgent onslaught but to stand fast in it, if only in order to be able to be urged and to urge beyond itself. Only what stands can fall. But withstanding the urgent onslaught urges toward permanence and stability. Permanence and the urge toward it are thus nothing alien or contradictory to the life-urge, but correspond to the essence of bodying life. In order to live, the living must for its own sake be propelled toward the permanent.
[Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. III, chap. 13.][/size]
The urge toward change and the urge toward permanence: these are the Eros (life instinct) and the death instinct (Thanatos) from Freudian psychology. They correspond to what Heidegger, at the end of the first volume of his Nietzsche, calls “art” and “truth”, respectively. ‘Art’ cannot do without ‘truth’, expansion cannot do without consolidation. Being, according to Heidegger, is an opening-abiding Governing: it is an Opening, as of a flower, but at the same time an Abiding of that which opens, for if it were only an Opening it would be only a hole, a void, a nothing. To be is to flower, to blossom, to flourish. It is to will to power:
[size=95]Will To Power (WTP) is opposed to Social Darwinism (SD); whereas SD talks of evolution’s will to survival, Nietzsche argued that Nature does not seek to so much survive, as to flourish.
WTP describes that constant expansion of things even to the point of their own extinction and destruction (and hence not always to survival).
[Moody Lawless.][/size]
Both the urge toward change and the urge toward permanence are at bottom the will to power, however. The urge toward change can be understood as the will toward a future thing, the urge toward permanence as the will toward a present thing (and as Crowley says, we can never know what is happening, only what has just happened). The will cannot do without two representations (German Vorstellungen):
[size=95]Nietzsche argues that being [without a capital, meaning “that which is”] is as fixated, as permanent; and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet being is both of these, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming [with a capital, meaning “the nature of that which becomes”]), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured.
[Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. II, chap. 26. Cf. http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=159843 (but note that my capitalisation in that thread is not always correct).][/size]
To answer your question, then: one cannot live in total immersion at all; one can only die in it. For it is immersion in expansion, dissolution, annihilation. It is immersion in ‘art’ in the universal sense. Art cannot do without philosophy, which is the quest for truth. Even though “art is worth more than truth” [Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 853], it needs truth as its right hand, its wife, its significant other. They are not equals, yet need each other equally. This is why great art is always philosophical (e.g., Morrison), while great philosophy is always artistic (e.g., Nietzsche). Being is an artistic-philosophical Dominating (cf. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/human_superhuman/message/172).
Sauwelios,
Flow (psychology) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)] To answer your question, then: one cannot live in total immersion at all; one can only die in it. So we are never in total immersion, even when we are children? Also, what about immersion and philosophy? Doesn’t the first make the second more difficult?
I guess this is what I meant by childlike self-absorbedness, but if one thinks this represents the absolute victory of Eros over the death instinct, one is deceived. It may seem that way, feel that way; but unconsciously, instinctively, all kinds of decisions are made in such a state. There is still struggle, though there may be no feeling of struggle.
An interesting idea, by the way, though the Wikipedia entry is severely limited (no explanation of “challenge” and “skill”, for instance).
Absolute immersion or ‘flow’ would be completely unconscious, because the ideas of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, which are indispensable for consciousness, are themselves products of the death instinct (they are unchanging).
Consider what would happen to an infant if its parents or guardians would allow it total immersion. Sticking its fingers into a power socket is only one of the consequences I can imagine. But it’s un-Freudian to think that repression first comes from the side of the parents. Rather, it’s something that springs from within. Freud’s thinking is very complex, and most popular conceptions of it are false. I have to delve into it again in order to refresh my memory.
Apparently you have not understood your own link. If immersion is ‘flow’, then the skill of the immersed person matches the difficulty (“challenge”) of the activity. You may want to compare this passage:
[size=95]It is hard to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati [Sanskrit for “the way the stream of the Ganges flows along”] among men who think and live differently, namely kurmagati [“the way turtles walk”] or, at best, “the way frogs walk”, mandeikagati[.]
[Nietzsche, BGE 27.][/size]
Great philosophers like Nietzsche perform the act of thinking, i.e., of philosophising, in ‘flow’.
I can also interpret your question as follows. “Is not philosophy being aloof? And is not that the opposite of being immersed?”
—[size=95][A]ll popular conceptions of them [philosophers and the philosophical states of mind] are false.
[ibid., 213.]
[T]oday if one hears anyone commended for living ‘wisely’ or ‘like a philosopher’, it means hardly more than ‘prudently and apart’. Wisdom: that seems to the populace to be a kind of flight, an artifice and means for getting oneself out of a dangerous game; but the genuine philosopher—as he seems to us, my friends?—lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely’, above all imprudently, and bears the burden and duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the dangerous game…
[ibid., 205.]
[The philosopher of the future is] the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit who is constantly pushed away from all sidelines and from every Beyond by his own driving power, [the creative spirit] whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were a flight from reality—: whereas it is his immersion, burial, and absorption into reality[.]
[Nietzsche, GM II 24.][/size]
(Note: Nietzsche was himself such a ‘philosopher of the future’; and the philosopher of the future is a genuine philosopher, that is, a great philosopher.)
The thing is that philosophy, as the quest for truth, i.e., as a form of the death instinct, is still a Willing-to-power: the will to permanence is one of the two most basic forms of the will to power. And Willing-to-power (and that is what all activity is!) can be done in all the eight compartments from Csíkszentmihályi’s diagram: ‘apathy’, ‘boredom’, ‘worry’, ‘relaxation’, ‘anxiety’, ‘control’, ‘arousal’, and ‘flow’.
(To think the way the Ganges runs is to think in ‘flow’. In what compartments from Csíkszentmihályi’s diagram might the other two ways be?—I think one’s skill in thinking will generally match the challenge of the problems one takes on. So tortoise-like thinkers will generally think in ‘apathy’ (in Hindu terms: in tamas), while frog-like thinkers (among whom I think I should count myself) will generally be leaping from compartment to compartment!)
Hm, I think I have misunderstood the diagram. Rather than different people standing at different points on the “skill level” axis, the difference between people may be represented by the scale of the diagram: more skilled people may have ‘larger’ diagrams, i.e., ‘longer’ “skill level” and “challenge level” axes.
Or, a little more democratic: whereas Nietzsche could be in ‘flow’ when thinking about the most difficult philosophical problems, he might well have lapsed into ‘anxiety’ had he found himself in shark-infested waters. We all have our greater and lesser skills…
I try to take the most extreme positions on free-speech possible. So, definately these works should not have been taken down.
Are you familiar with Graham Ovenden?
Structural models do not explain human behavior…If they did, it is possible that the rules of logic would apply…
It’s an art when you are portraying nude adults in paintings and exhibitions but yeah it is some how porn when you are portraying a kid in a pic like this.
Isn’t it possible that some pcitures could be both and some neither?
In the context of the OP, I doubt whether it was an art or not is relevant. The relevant thing is whether taking of and publicly exhibiting such pictures, is permissible. If someone is playing loud sounds, the relevant thing is not whether it is considered music but whether the volume at which it is being played is acceptable.