Melania Trump, our former first lady, has written a book about herself, and some commentaries came along about her past career, which included posing nude for men’s magazines.
I saw her nude photos years ago and, other than that they belong to our nation’s future first lady, nothing stood out as such photos go. But what got my attention is the fact that Mrs. Trump was “outraged” that critics were harsh on her nude modeling career and defended her essentially “commercial” photo job as “art” work. It just so happens that in my younger days, I wrote a book titled “Art, Beauty and Pornography,” and naturally I was curious as to how she explained her nude modeling as works of art.
According to Raw Story (Sept. 18), she likened her photo shoots to Michelangelo’s David. “Are we no longer able to appreciate the beauty of the human body?” questions Melania. “Throughout history (says she), master artists have revered the human shape.” Thus linking her body of work to artworks of history, Melania concludes that “We should honor our bodies, and embrace the timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self expression.”
As an art critic who has done some serious research on art and the beautiful human body — from Venus to Playboy centerfolds — I agree with her completely. Yes, art history is replete with nude bodies of both men and women that are aesthetically wonderful to behold. It’s a simple truism no one can dispute.
The only trouble with her statement of art philosophy and the beautiful human body, including her own, is that her nude pictures were not art: They were pornography.
The distinction between art and pornography, like between Venus and Playboy centerfolds, is not easy to tell when they are both perfectly beautiful, and flawlessly interchangeable, as Melania could have posed for the Greek artisan just as easily. But in spite of the difficulty of telling them apart, the distinction is crucial: Our social and practical (not to mention legal) requirements demand that we do distinguish art from pornography. For art we go to a local museum with our family, and for pornography we browse Playboy which we hide from our family. But they all look beautiful in themselves.
Law is not much clearer. Justice Stewart Potter, whose juries often sent people to prison on obscenity convictions, famously confessed that even he couldn’t tell art and pornography apart. But “community standards” dictate that we must distinguish the two categories by some sociological (or common sense), not visual, criteria.
Our former nude model and former first lady illustrates this confusion and argues that her nude photos for men’s magazines are indistinguishable from Michelangelo’s artworks. Well, actually, we can and we should distinguish them — if only for the sake of art.
Four decades ago in the book, in order to defend art from pornography, I posed three criteria for the distinction, which are still serviceable. One, is there just one original, presumably hanging at the museum, or are there many identical copies in mass circulation? Two, are they intended to excite (mostly) men’s prurient interest? Three, are such products designed, manufactured and sold to primarily create profit? If the answers are yes, yes and yes, there we have pornographic works, not artworks.
Regretfully, by our common-sense criteria just considered, Melania’s nude photos are not art; they are pornography. She posed for Sports Illustrated (famous for its swimsuit issues) and Max (a men’s magazine published all over Europe and Australia), both of which exist in millions of identical copies just to arouse men’s interest in naked female bodies and, along the way, increase the producer’s profit.
If Melania had posed for an artist who used her as a model for his artwork, whether displayed in a museum or not, she would be highly honored and we would agree completely with her statements that her nude poses harkened back to Michelangelo’s and other lofty artworks.
But she had posed for a pornographer, and given this existential circumstance, whose process was indelibly tied to mass circulation, sexual arousal and profit motive — the three universal pornographic requirements — she is merely trying to cover up her pornographic career as an artistic enterprise. Justice Potter and his juries would have no difficulty in identifying her nude photos as pornography, not art.
However, she has an option of defending her nude posing career, without having to evoke Michelangelo or art: She has the economic defense, which is our universal right to earn a living with our own labor. It is her right as a poor immigrant, endowed with a beautiful body, to survive any way she could. Survival trumps all other moral imperatives and she used her best natural asset and posed nude for men’s magazines that saw commercial value in her body. For this economic commandment, she was justified in having posed nude for men’s magazines to survive in a pitilessly unsympathetic society.
Any occupation that we hold in America for our economic survival, even as prostitutes, mercenaries, evictors, repossession men, lawyers, professors, and so on — is justified as long as it is not for profit or power beyond survival. Melania could simply say, yes, I sold myself, as all of you do for a living in a capitalist society, to a pornographer who calculated his own profit in my photos: So, all of you moral critics, cast the first stone if you will.
Glory be the successful commoditization of her beauty, and may her photos become bestsellers. But, please, as pornographic products, not as works of art!
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.
First appeared on www.recorder.com