Is it art or porn?

Merciful heavens! Think of the children!

Of course it's art. They all have big dicks.

They are tasteful dicks.

It seems more like cruising masquerading as photography.

Well I never in all my life!!

Ugh, this tired, attention-grabbing con. Again.

I don't like the idea that an erect penis is always porn. And Josh is adorable.

I thought he seemed adorable but as it went on it was endlessly golly gosh, naked, can you imagine, jeez?

Too coy to be true.

Agree with R6 - there's nothing artistic about these. It's just guys with big dicks (usually) with filters and lighting.

Sorry, but you have to call shit out sometimes. I didn't listen to what he had to say because it was obvious - it's just some man's blown-up porn collection that he likes to call 'art'.

No it's not subversive. No, there's no deeper meaning. No, it doesn't cause me to think about the human body and what is considered beautiful...blahblahblah

Cheap trick.

That’s the way dicks should look. Not those tiny things you see on most real guys!

The answer to this question should always be: No, it’s neither. This is a tired con that has been done a million times. You’re doing this because it guarantees clicks and media attention and to cover for the fact that you have no original ideas and your work is perfectly mediocre at best.

I voted porn because the dicks look bigger than average and there isn't even a face/headshot, nothing humanising the person. It's only about sexual objectification.

Anyone who entertains this question like it’s some sort of philosophical debate on culture, society and aesthetics is a drooling dumbass.

I can’t believe people can still get away with this stupid trick in 2021. The world is just getting dumber and dumber.

Congratulations! You’re an idiot.

I truly believe society is headed for a dark ages.

He’s right to go on and on about Spencer - that’s art. The rest look like ISMELL flyers.

Those are some bigass dicks.

Ironic how he gives this introduction at the beginning about the exhibit's purpose, and how part of that was for men to be able to come into that space and talk about gay men's health issues and feel comfortable. Then the entire exhibit is just models with thin, muscled bodies and big dicks. How would that make an average gay man comfortable?

It's like other posters mentioned: it's just photos of naked male models. Tale as old as time. He says the show is "confronting the male nude" but there's no confrontation. Nothing new. Nothing thought-provoking.

R13 - yes drooling dumbasses, I agree. Plus - I recognize quite a few of these men from porn.

These aren't even his photos! You can't tell me he had all of these men come to his gallery in Oklahoma.

If it involves fluffed dicks, it’s NEVER art.

He’s stealing my bit.

R21 - no, your pics were fresh, in black and white and had artistic merit.

This is just nudies.

What did he do with all the photos of average-dicked men he must have taken? Or did he check they had big dicks before he set up the shoot?

R23,these were the people willing to be photographed naked. Plus, it sounds like people referred the models to him - like they knew his desired type.

I went back for the spencer photos. This man talks a lot.

When you got it, you want to flaunt it! 🍆

THIS IS HIGH ART!!!!!

And I appreciate the arts

If the peckers had all been average size & flaccid it would be art IMO. But as every one of them is way above average, and clearly partially or fully engorged, it's porn.

There's a funny line in Roger Ebert's Little Movie Glossary that says something like "If a woman takes off her top in a movie and has small boobs, it's a drama or a foreign film. If she has big boobs it's a T&A film"

Maybe something similar would apply with dick size!

ART

The anti-human trolls are control freaks who hate the human body.

It’s porn 🤡

This is porn, there's no racial, penile or body diversity. It's quite sad what some queens pass off as art. Tasteless honestly.

R29 it's not about being puritanical. People are just calling a spade a spade. He can showcase porn for all I care, but I won't blow smoke up his ass and call it art.

You can tell it’s art, because it’s framed.

Plus, he colorizes two of the photos - one showcases spencer.

I guess Oklahoma isn't a dystopian shithole with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Standing in a locker room full of men--and I go to a gay gym--those nudes are not representative of most nude men, even the ones who work out regularly. The dick sizes in those photos are way out of proportion to the average male. The photographer did not just randomly happen upon all of his men with big cocks. He chose it that way, which make the intent sort of porn and not art. Plus he needs to add a more men with intact penises to his collection.

R33 you got me 🤣

I feel like labeling this art is like labeling maroon 5 a rock band, just because there's a guitar. Maybe some people do though, wth do I know.

This is ridiculous. "This is one of my favorites," he says about a intense close up of two huge cocks. Jesus. It completely perpetuates unreal expectations for men's bodies. "Do you care if I get just a few photos of him?" Give me a break. Body dysmorphia gets a win today, apparently.

Did he fuck any of them after?

I doubt if Spencer stood still long enough for the photographer to get a feel. He sounds like Elfine Starkadder from “Cold Comfort Farm” -schizophrenic, autistic, or retarded. Bonus points for Spenser: No visible tattoos.

Did he fluff them himself?

Photographers who call themselves "artists" are the worst.

With digital cameras, any idiot with a sense of framing and lighting can take a good photo.

The arty porn ones are the worst....it's an excuse for dirty old pervs to take naked photos of dudes they wanna fuck...then call it art.

Penis.

It's great art. It should be hung in churches everywhere. Worship the penis god!

Where are the flaccid, small to average cocks? Truly flaccid, no fluff. Soft cocks rock (and add more foreskin).

The difference between art and everything else is not what it is but who makes it. Art lives in galleries and there are gatekeepers who make these decisions.

An average person takes these pictures, it’s porn. A MFA takes these pictures, it’s art.

art films........NUDIES!

The ad where he recruited models for his "art" probably appeared on Craigslist and specified "Big dicks only!!!"

#5 = Miss Lindsey

These aren’t any better than 100s of photographers on model mayhem, and I don’t think they’re especially artistic. Josh is a cutie though, and I hope he’s taken some pics of himself.

We're forming a fact finding commission to study this exhibit in depth.

How do I get a hold of Las Vegas Jordan?

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Most porn is super trashy art. Some successful art can achieve arousal as with porn.

Amusing how the classical Greeks would react, for example. They had some similar tastes body-wise, but preferred small cocks at least artistically.

Exactly, R18. If he wanted to “confront the male nude,” he should have taken pictures of real average men of all ages, races, shapes, and cock sizes. But, of course, that wouldn’t be as alluring or focused on, now would it.

[quote] It's great art. It should be hung in churches everywhere. Worship the penis god!

They’re hung enough, ma’am.

Nudes can be amazing art. But these are just cheesy pics of big dicks. It's not saying anything. It's fine. I can go to Twitter or pornhub and see the same thing.

Skinny bendy penises. If this is porn, it's disappointing.

It's not really porn and it's certainly not art... it's more... turgid erotica.

One of the things that annoys me about his narration is how he doesn't even discuss the semis and the full blown erections. Why? What was the point of it in the photograph? Nature abhors a vacuum.

This work has the impact of a toy train. And the people supporting it or talking about it are the little stuffed animals in the toy train.

But is it art, sweetie?

Naked men? Groundbreaking

It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!

Yes, it's art. Cliche art, but definitely, without a doubt, art. If there were actual men, with normal male cocks, it would definitely be worthy of being a serious artistic impression. I'm sick of the male body always being "porn" while anything with labia and titties is considered "beautiful" and "empowering".

He's obviously a vapid, looks-obsessed queen, but that's his art and art is subjective. He's always doing it in multiple mediums so, yeah. It's art. Banal perhaps but art.

He should’ve call this “Big Dicks in Two Tone.”

R66, that's a fair point. It makes me think of Thomas Kinkade - horrific, horrible but bad art is still art. Just bad art? Maybe porn is just standard photography/video whereas this is manipulated in some way, so maybe that's still 'art', just not good art.

Porn is people having sex, isn't it? This is just erotica. Run of the mill erotic, granted, but still... not porn.

R68, the more I look at his stuff, and his website, the more frustrated this guy makes me. Yeah, it's art, without a doubt. But it's the same old thing that people expect when the male body is represented in fine art. He seems convinced he's the second coming of Maplethorpe.

Looking at his website and other work, he clearly goes out of his way to depict "edgy" black women and other women of various sizes and poses. Yet, he just can't tolerate a fat, or rail-thin, or average or unappealing MAN. He's clearly self-loathing and wouldn't give any of us the time of day unless we're rocking an Adonis belt mid-drift while handing him a check. Just take a look at his "team" on his website. He's clearly hiring guys to be fucked by, no chubby gay photography apprentices or seasoned production people. Just helpers who are '2Hawt 2 B believed'. He's exhausting and I sent him a note saying as much, asking him to consider his platform and to please incorporate a few average/real guys in his future projects. (yeah, I know. Mary!)

Did someone say 'erotica'?

I gotta give her credit... the old skank looked pretty good there.

Though even then those tits were a metaphor for Glenn Close's career.

^ which is to say not quite perfect and destined to sag.

R70, I LOVE that you sent him a note. <3

I ask myself, would I hang a portrait featuring flaccid men in my home without feeling sleazy? Yes. Would I hang these on my wall without feeling like a creeper? Uh, no. I would hide these whenever mama and the family stop by. Why? Because it is porn. Straight up.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, and dumb.

R71 I forget what a fab body Madonna had. Great tits, too.

[quote]If he wanted to “confront the male nude,” he should have taken pictures of real average men of all ages, races, shapes, and cock sizes.

Ain’t nobody got time for puny cocklets!

That first pic (guy hiding his junk) is definitely art.

The close-ups of big semi-erect and erect cocks? Not really so much.

So how successful is this guy in the art world? Gallery representation? Prices?

Sorry not watching the video. Huge penises make me anxious.

Lots of haters on the lower end of the bell curve!

I wish my dick were even as close to being as big as these porn-star cocks.

Of course it's art. If it's self-expression, it's art. Whether it's good art is another subject entirely.

Oh FFS of course it's not porn - what kind of pearl-clutching prudes are you to think that photography of the male nude is porn?

I've posed naked for a photographer for an exhibition of the male nude before and it wasn't remotely sexual or porny. How repressed and puritanical do you have to be to equate nudity with pornography?

He has a talent for finding men with big juicy dicks to pose for him for sure. He's very cute himself, were any of him? (I skimmed through so I didn't see whether any were self-portrait).

R83 and R84 are the types to fill your head with nonsensical 'high-minded' concepts of art while gleefully sitting on a piece of cow dung in an art gallery.

R83 - if you're willing to say all self-expression is art, then no self-expression is bad and all art is therefore good. No, it isn't.

R84 - nobody is shrieking about nudity and that nudity doesn't have a place in artistic expression. These are just regular nude portraits and dick pics. Moreover, it's being discussed as some sort of grand exploration of gay men's health and the representation of the male body - when none of that exists in this exhibit. It's just handsome men with big dicks - no real variety or anything special about any of the photos. THAT is what people are objecting to. The pretentiousness of all this to say it is something different than what we see everyday on Corbin Fisher pages.

Art can be pretty much anything. Obviously this guy's work can be seen as art but it's basically lifeless sex photography without much artistic talent in display. If you want to see what talent and true professionalism is take a look at a recent thread about Bruce Weber. The guy may be a sex pest but my God does he know how to take beautiful pictures. This guy is an amateur who's pretty much only doing what his dick wants. You can just bet he's beating his meat to those pics constantly.

And yes of course these pics are porn as well. R84, these are not just pictures of male nudes. He's clearly concentrating on huge cocks and that in itself makes them very sexual. And since he's not Mapplethorpe we're left with artistically average pics of big dicks, and nothing else. These pictures are actually so devoid of any meaning that I find it a bit insulting to call them art. But since anything can be art...

BTW, he's technically competent enough to possibly take pictures that have something to say. But he keeps concentrating on taking pics of huge dicks which probably tells all there is to know about his artistic intentions: He has a fetish and he takes pictures to feed it.

Self-expression can indeed be bad, R85. It can also be trashy, boring, derivative, staid, dull, unimaginative, magnificent, glorious, and many other adjectives too numerous to list.

Why not both?

R87 - well, the rhetorical argument would be - how can how someone chooses to express themselves is 'bad' or in your words, 'dull', 'trashy', etc.? Self-expression is 'art' so how someone expresses themselves should be valid and immune to criticism because it is how THAT PERSON is expressing themselves.

See? It's just fucking word salad about concepts - just a bunch of mental masturbation.

There is bad art. And this is it - it is also so mindless and cliche that we could put it into the porn category. We judge the quality of art and artistic expression every day in almost every field - graphic design, acting, music, food, even coding.

Amateur

It's rather explicit to be called art. The photographer and the subjects of the photos may call it art, but it seems like it's soft-core porn.

R84 Link please?

[quote]It's rather explicit to be called art

How "explicit" something is has nothing to do with whether or not it's art. People have been painting and sculpting erect dicks for thousands of years. Art can be explicit.

There are plenty of paintings of women getting eaten out by demons with their tits out and their legs spread and just because they were painted in the 1800s and earlier somewhere in Europe doesn't mean the artist didn't know that at some point someone might think it was sexual and pop a boner to it.

There are plenty of serious photographers who will spend the morning photographing a celeb for Vanity Fair Magazine then go off and photograph a naked man at night.

And if you look at both sets of photos carefully you can tell that there's a technique to it and you can see it.

As for this guy, it's clear he's not just whipping out his iPhone and snapping pics. I don't particularly think the photos he's displaying are interesting though.

[quote]The photographer and the subjects of the photos may call it art, but it seems like it's soft-core porn.

The photographer also has an MFA and does serious commercial work. As others have said, art is subjective. For me, however, it's also about intent. He didn't intend for it to be straight up porn and I feel that when I look at the photos.

I feel zero sexual connection to any of them. However, I don't even feel any sort of an "emotional" connection to them. Art should do that.

Well there is one I liked. I liked the one of the guy in Vegas. That one was interesting to me. If you go to the "model's" Instagram and look up other photos the guy has taken of himself, there's a totally different vibe because he's not a professional photographer and the one that took his photo in that hotel room is.

Pornographic art of guys with beautiful penises.

It's a floor wax that tastes like a dessert topping.

SNL reference! ZING!

Do you think an acquaintance of his started this thread to make fun of him? I hope so. This is tacky and feels ill-intended. Agree with the posters who drag him for the pretentious name of the exhibit. Who's it confronting...a few boomer ladies who lunch donors?

Don't agree with you at all R86 - you're basically saying, because I have a big dick then any photo that were to be taken of it is automatically sexual and classed as porn? How does that make sense in your head? So a picture of a small dick wouldn't be porn? If he had a mixture of big and small dicks would that satisfy you?

R98, if the dicks were super tiny the pics would indeed have a stronger message. Subject matter does matter. Tiny dicks would comment on how rare it is to see them photographed sensually, unlike with big dicks. The reality is porn is filled with huge cocks these days. That in itself makes these photos so bland because they show nothing we haven't seen a million times before. And yes, a big dick is in many ways much more of a a sexual object than an average one.

You can argue how much you like that this kind of imagery is business as usual in the gay culture and has nothing to do with porn but the reality is huge dicks are still obscene for most of us. But still what you're saying is partly true. It's sad how totally normal porn and sexy nudity is in our culture. I love Tom of Finland but I wouldn't want to surround myself with his most explicit prints. Some people do and that's obviously fine but it's also quite obvious how desensitizing that can be.

The only thing these pics have going for them is the size of the dicks. It makes it pretty much their sole focal point. And that means they're mostly meant for sexual gratification.

If these dicks weren't all TURGID, it'd be more like art.

The fact that the focus is all on the arousal, the erection, to the point of cropping out the faces and most of the body in some of the images, makes it more porn than art.

R92 sorry to disappoint, the pics (as far as I'm aware) are not online. It was 20 years ago.

Erections with a tint is porn.

[quote]I feel zero sexual connection to any of them. However, I don't even feel any sort of an "emotional" connection to them. Art should do that.

Adding, I think it's harder and harder (no pun intended, but what luck!) to feel that, if you're a thinking person. We're saturated by naked people and hard dicks and good lighting and use of shadows and all the tricks (no pun intended.) To present something which provokes a connection is hard. It's like trying to produce a superior French fry now.

I will say the one interesting shot was his friend on the dock and then only because you saw his face, he was out of studio, it was an interesting expression. But I think it only stood out in comparison to the rest of the run of the mill Dickabod Cranes.

Wonder where he found such gorgeous, uninhibited, big dicked models.

R99 I still don't agree with you. Just because a dick is big or it's the focus of a photo, does not automatically mean it is for sexual gratification. I don't see how size matters in this regard. That's like someone else above said, would you say a photo of a woman with big tits was porn but if they were small it's art? That's bollocks.

R105, you're trying to claim sex isn't the main point in these pics but it is because the photographer hasn't been able or didn't want to bring in practically any other meaning to them. It's like with the big tits in films, if an attractive enough woman with huge knockers bares them it most definitely is something different than if she was flat chested. That's because generally speaking bigger tits are seen more desirable, and the bigger they get the rarer they are. Being nude is still in many ways a taboo, especially when the subject matter is sexually aroused, like in some of these pics.

But there really is no need to argue over this. The pics aren't really worthy of it. These things are always subjective to a point. I get what you're saying and I don't pretend to be some kind of authority in the matter. I'm just someone who grew up reading my dad's hardcore porn mags and later when studying arts in the university ventured into photography a bit, some of it taking pics of nude guys with their dicks out. I've had to consider questions like smut vs art, porn vs sensual, good vs bad over the years.

The only reason we're talking about these pics is because of their subject matter, big dicks. Nothing wrong with that, though. I actually applaud the photographer for reaching the level he's at technically but I'm frustrated how lackluster his work is and that's where my negativity is coming from since these pics aren't really worthy of long discussions.

[quote]The fact that the focus is all on the arousal, the erection, to the point of cropping out the faces and most of the body in some of the images, makes it more porn than art.

So by this logic Herb Ritts, George Platt Lynes and Bruce Weber are art.

Helmut Newton mostly photographed women but they're full frontal nude with their vaginas out so is that art or porn?

While Mapplethorpe is porn as is Terry Richardson but mentally I can't put those two in the same category.

The small-dick rage on display in this thread is art.

A bit crass, no?