3. On Hierarchies of Art

underhandedpenguin:

Tumblr, I’m frustrated.

It’s not that I want you to delete my blog, but you’re not going to and I’m frustrated because that puts me in a position where I have to decide if keeping the audience and the community I have here is worth allowing myself to participate in what you’re doing.

I know you’re not going to delete my blog because I don’t have pornographic pictures on here except for maybe a handful of reblogs. I’m a writer, and this blog is full of my stories, and many of those stories are pornographic. But erotic literature isn’t considered adult content under your new rules, and is still allowed. And that’s frustrating to me.

You’ve always been a bad website for writers, Tumblr. And that is one of a very small number of things that honestly isn’t your fault. Any writer on this site can tell you that visual art gets far more attention than writing. Fanart gets more than fanfiction, original art gets more than original fiction. Every writer on this site has seen a post by a visual artist at least once saying that they only got a hundred likes on something they drew, and I have to write forty chapters minimum if I want a hundred likes.

I’m not complaining about that. It’s the nature of the website, the nature of the community here, and we as writers all know that when we sign up. That isn’t the problem. People on Tumblr are more oriented towards visual art, and we have Ao3 at the end of the day. It isn’t anyone’s fault that this is a bad platform for writers, and I’m not here to complain about it.

But it is, and the reason why I’m explaining that is because it’s the context for what’s happening right now. You’ve banned erotic visual art but not erotic literature. And that’s because you know that about your user base, you know that visual art is what they’re here for, not written art.

And in so doing, Tumblr, you’ve created a strange hierarchy of art, one that goes in two directions, neither of them good.

On the one hand, the fact that you’ve banned erotic visual art but not erotic literature makes it very clear that pornography is pictures. I should say here that I know your primary concern in banning pornography was focused on images and videos of real people having sex, and that’s a whole other issue that I’ll tackle another day. But your stipulation against depicting sex acts explicitly includes illustrations. Pornography is pictures, including drawn pictures. The implication here is that only visual art can convey eroticism, that people will only be sexually interested in pictures, not words.

Trust me when I say that people like written pornography just fine, Tumblr.

Sending this message creates an idea that visual art is more powerful than written art, that pictures speak louder than words, that pictures are more dangerous than words. It gives visual art a place of primacy by centering it as the only thing that people can have an emotional or sexual response to. There’s no point in writing in that mentality, because visual art can do it better, because visual art is better.

But on the other hand, banning erotic visual art but not erotic literature also makes plain that you place higher value on one art form other the other. Artistic nudity is still permitted under the new adult content rules (or it would be if your bot would stop flagging medieval paintings of Jesus as sensitive), and so is erotic literature. One is forced to draw a comparison between the two, to assume that what you’re really banning is that which you consider non-artistic nudity and erotic material.

Basically, you’ve shown your hand in banning what you’re banning. You’re sorting artistic expression into what which is acceptable and that which is…I don’t want to be too inflammatory, but I’m going to go ahead and say degenerate anyway. You’ve hierarchized art in this way to say that literature is real art and illustration isn’t. In this second schema, real artists write and drawing is a waste of time.

And I’ve spent three days trying to figure out how the hell you can hold both of those positions at the same time, Tumblr. It’s easy to just write it off as you behaving irrationally (you are) or as your policy being incoherent (it is), but I don’t really think that’s what’s going on. It seems on the surface like you’re using one corner of your digital mouth to say that pictures are more dangerous than words and then the other corner to say that words are real art and pictures aren’t, and of course those positions aren’t consummate with one another.

But then I realized that the hierarchy that you’ve set up isn’t actually about defining real art by medium or genre. It’s about defining real art by its social power. Real art is art that holds up your status quo, that doesn’t threaten you, doesn’t potentially damage your advertising revenue. Real art is aesthetic, it’s pleasant, it’s neutral. It doesn’t speak to a baser human trait like sexuality, it involves the mind, the intellect, not just the eyes.

My readers are very smart, but you don’t need to be a great intellect to read my work, Tumblr.

I admit I’m still working on these ideas, and I think there’s a lot more to it than what I’ve said so far, but I think I’m onto something with this, Tumblr. I think you’re trying, like so many dictatorial figures before you, to depoliticize art, to make it value-neutral so that it can’t hurt you. To remove that which speaks to humans in ways that you don’t like and keep only that which doesn’t make people think in the wrong direction.

And the fact that you think pictures do that and words don’t tells me that you’re not just a bad website for writers, Tumblr. You’re a bad website for visual artists too.

Because the fact that you think it’s even possible to depoliticize art tells me that you don’t know anything about art.

And you never have.