Popular porn site Pornhub is now sponsoring art, but is Maccarone gallery’s The Pleasure Principle exhibition just a gimmick?
- The Maccarone gallery in Los Angeles has chosen the art, while Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest porn sites, is paying for the show’s production and installation
The fine line between art’s (often) tasteful nudes and pornography’s graphic takes on human sexuality will be blurred this month when Los Angeles’ Maccarone gallery partners with Pornhub to present an exhibition called “The Pleasure Principle”.
Michele Maccarone is known for presenting challenging, occasionally impenetrable contemporary art by the likes of Bjarne Melgaard and, more recently, actor Jim Carrey.
Pornhub, meanwhile, is known for streaming pornography to roughly 120 million daily visitors.
There’s a way you’re supposed to behave in the art world – represent an artist, go to art fairs – but [art] should be anything goes
“We’ve been reaching out and doing a lot of diverse things for quite some time now,” says Corey Price, Pornhub’s vice-president. The website, which reported 33.5 billion visits in 2018, also did a show with the Museum of Sex in New York called “STAG: The Illicit Origins of Pornographic Film”.
“I think it’s important to get involved culturally and move the brand in different, diverse directions,” Price says. “But we don’t just randomly sponsor art things – we want it to be part of the conversation of sex and sexuality in the art space.”
The company was put in touch with Maccarone and suggested an exhibition “highlighting pleasure and sexuality”. Almost immediately, he says, “we were on the same page about what we were trying to achieve”.
Now that vision is set to become a reality, when the exhibition opens on September 21 and runs until November 23.
Representation of women
The calculus behind a streaming-porn site sponsoring an exhibition of envelope-pushing, sexualised art is fairly straightforward.
From a gallery’s end though, the exercise could be fraught: Consensual sex work and pornography, by definition, raise complex questions about misogyny and exploitation.
But Maccarone says that a pro-sex, pro-female show is directly in keeping with her gallery’s programming, which hosted feminist art exhibitions in 2016 and as recently as last year. “I have a whole thing about the current mode of content-cleansing,” she says. “Art is so market-driven these days, and I’m interested in reclaiming this history of sexuality, specifically female sexuality. It’s something I’m really passionate about.”
A new model