Here’s a chunk of a New Statesman article by Tabatha Leggett on whether porn can ever be art (especially prescient for me, as I’ve just started drawing smut again after a long break):

“…Feminist philosopher Anne Eaton, who writes about this subject often, thinks that expressing a morally dubious message undermines the value of a work of art because it requires its viewers to identify with ethical deformities, which distracts them from appreciating the works as art. Put simply, she reckons that to enjoy porn, you have to (at least temporarily) objectify women, and you can’t do this at the same time as contemplating it as art.

Eaton’s arguments are tendentious. Obviously pornography doesn’t always require viewers to objectify women. That’s simply an accurate, if not particularly astute, observation about the majority of the stuff you’ll find on any teenage boy’s laptop. But she’s wrong to think that you can’t objectify someone in a work of art and contemplate its artistic value at the same time. There are loads of artworks that let you do that. Remember Fiona Banner’s 2002 Turner Prize nominee “Arsewoman in Wonderland”, a pornographic film transcript printed in pink ink on a large canvas? It says things like, “he cums in her face, she moans and rolls over”. You can objectify the woman being described and think about whether it’s art at the same time.

The same goes for basically everything that Jeff Koons ever made. Koons even spoke about the function of the explicit paintings from his 1989 exhibition “Made in Heaven” being twofold: to encourage audiences to form opinions about acceptable expression of sexuality and to get them feeling a little hot under the collar…”

Full article here.