Sat., Aug. 2, 7pm

Gallery Lombardi , 602 W. Seventh Ste. A

There is so much porn on the Internet these days, really, why even bother with an erotica art show? Perhaps you have a beef with representationalism? Maybe you like your body parts all angled and askew and akimbo like a Picasso cubist nude? Or maybe you’re into Bambi-eyed hentai bimbos with huge, shiny, watermelon boobs and hairless nethers who straddle anaconda-sized penises spewing ropy fountains of shimmering jiz? Maybe you’re especially fond of the ones where the girls have furry bunny ears and hooves instead of feet? With animé, anything’s possible. Same with Photoshop. If you haven’t taken a nude picture of yourself and then pasted Johnny Wadd’s tally-whacker (enlarged 1000% so it’s roughly the girth of a duffel bag) over your shrunken tadpole, you’re not really utilizing technology to its fullest extent. If you do it right, people will be asking you, “What’s that giant mushroom in the foreground of your MySpace photo?” So what if you can’t deliver the goods in meatspace. Real life is just a consecutive series of crushing disappointments anyway, isn’t it? Besides, imagine having to schlep around a duffel-bag-sized penis all the time. The carnies would tease you mercilessly. You’re much better off packing your spandex banana hammock with a baby-arm-shaped wad of biscuit dough. Sure, it might start smelling a little yeasty down there after a while, but people expect that from someone wearing a spandex banana hammock in the real world. Rocking a slingshot on the Internet, however, is considered kitschy, especially if you’ve grafted your head onto Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1967 Mr. Universe photo. Of course, you shouldn’t miss out on all the fun just because your Y chromosome is on permanent sabbatical. Imagine how many Facebook friend requests you’d have if your profile photo featured a Dolly Parton-sized cleavage crevasse? Having a plastic surgeon load that kind of baggage on your fragile desk chair spine would be insane, but the Internet is a zero gravity environment. Even if you decide not to go top-heavy, at the very least you should drop in a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark. Passing up an opportunity like that is just being lazy. With just a little more effort, you could also throw a little digital collagen into those lips and pencil in some butterfly eyelashes. First impressions go a long way, and really, expecting people to live up to their image on the Internet is sort of like expecting all radio DJs to look like Ryan Seacrest. And really, for all you know, Ryan has three nipples and a wicked case of toenail fungus. Reality isn’t always pretty, even when you dress it up and hit it with an airbrush. People are inevitably imperfect – even Jenna Jameson doing a muff-n-duff with a couple of well-greased Gold’s Gym night managers is still going to reveal a few moles and stray hairs. Art, on the other hand, is always perfect because it’s always the embodiment of the artist’s ideal. That doesn’t mean it isn’t butt-ugly a lot of the time, it’s just that it’s as good as it could have possibly been at the time and under the circumstances in which it was created. Porn may be exhibitionistic, but certainly no more so than any other kind of art. The artist exposes his or her idealism to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world gets to appreciate it or mercilessly ridicule it, as the case may be. It’s a sort of porn of idealism. So really, art and porn aren’t even distant cousins. It’s just that when art gets sexy, it’s called erotica, and there’s usually not a money shot. That doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting and worth a peek. Maybe you should relax your grip on your joystick and head down to Gallery Lombardi, where this Saturday night from 7pm to 11pm they’re opening Erotica 2008, an exhibit of 50 erotic works from area artists. Along with erotica you can actually meet real people, who, although they’re imperfect, are much more interesting and erotically satisfying than porn could ever be.

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