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Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe has been the subject of a continuing series of debates about what is or is not art, about which art should be supported by public funds, and about the nature of his own work. At the center of the controversies are a group of works known as the X Portfolio which depict homoerotic sadomasochistic acts and, more generally, eroticize male genitalia in a manner never attempted before in Western art. The cancellation of a Mapplethorpe retrospective by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C., the uproar in Congress over funding the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the obscenity trial of a Cincinnati museum and its director were the major events in the controversy that reached beyond Mapplethorpe himself and extended to a public furor over the nature of art. In the midst of these controversies, the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto became one of the principal interpreters and defenders of Mapplethorpe's art. Danto's defense of Mapplethorpe was a part of his ongoing project of defining the nature of art in philosophic terms and encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of contemporary art. The formulation of his ideas took place in the course of reviewing a major retrospective of Mapplethorpe's work, writing about the work in a major essay accompanying the publication of some Mapplethorpe photographs, and defending the work in the course of the various public controversies. By examining Danto's assessment of Mapplethorpe's work the reader reaches a truer understanding of both the philosopher-critic's view of art and the art itself. Art such as Mapplethorpe's challenges and defies the viewer and, by entering areas that had never before been the subject of art, the work also called on a variety of responses--political and moral--that, whether they are wanted or not, can influence or interfere with the aesthetic response to the work. In Danto's elucidation of the aesthetic response to di...

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Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:29, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1695128.html