Sex Objects: Art And The Dialectics Of Desire

by Jennifer Doyle

The declaration that a work of art is “about sex” is often announced to the public as a scandal after which there is nothing else to say about the work or the artist-controversy concludes a conversation when instead it should begin a new one.

Moving beyond debates about pornography and censorship, Jennifer Doyle shows us that sex in art is as diverse as sex in everyday exciting, ordinary, emotional, traumatic, embarrassing, funny, even profoundly boring. Sex Objects examines the reception and frequent misunderstanding of highly sexualized images, words, and performances. In chapters on the “boring parts” of Moby-Dick, the scandals that dogged the painter Thomas Eakins, the role of women in Andy Warhol's Factory films, “bad sex” and Tracey Emin's crudely evocative line drawings, and L.A. artist Vaginal Davis's pornographic parodies of Vanessa Beecroft's performances, Sex Objects challenges simplistic readings of sexualized art and instead investigates what such works can tell us about the nature of desire.

In Sex Objects, Doyle offers a creative and original exploration of how and where art and sex connect, arguing that to proclaim a piece of art “about sex” reveals surprisingly little about the work, the artist, or the spectator. Deftly interweaving anecdotal and personal writing with critical, feminist, and queer theory, she reimagines the relationship between sex and art in order to better understand how the two meet-and why it matters.

Jennifer Doyle is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is coeditor, with Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, of Pop Queer Warhol.

Genres: Art, Theory, Research, Sexuality, Nonfiction

184 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 2006

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Erin Tuzuner]

Art, prostitution, queering literature: this is an excellent primer for all of these things and more.

[Lauren Deland]

It is difficult to talk about the sketchy, tenuous, and completely subjective lines that separate "art" from "pornography" without delving into the personal, which Doyle bravely does in this narrative-driven critical study of sex in art and popular culture. Doyle suggests that much writing about sex in art is essentially reductive in its prosaic boosterism of sexual expression, and reminds us that the other side of arousal is boredom-- the thwarting, or failure of desire and interest. Doyle explores the work of several very different artists spanning myriad disciplines in order to demonstrate that oftentimes the desire to find "sex" in art leads to a sort of performance anxiety on the part of the artist, performer or audience: simply put, art that engages with eroticism must necessarily focus on more than just the money shot.
Engrossing, entertaining and easy to read, this is a refreshingly juicy alternative to drier art criticism.

[Erdem Tasdelen]

What this book could benefit from is a change of title - the chapters touch on so many different subjects but "desire" is rarely there.
Doyle points out that to say that a work of art has to do with sex is saying incredibly little about it. She examines the works of Herman Melville, Thomas Eakins, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, Vanessa Beecroft and Vaginal Davis in relation to how they are situated within sexual politics, especially in terms of feminism and queer theory.
The most interesting part of the book for me was where it deals with the notion of boredom, and its depiction in certain works.
It is also a good introduction to other cultural/literary/visual critics as it is packed with borrowed ideas.

[Patricia]

This is my favorite academic book that I have read in a very long time.