Ray Beldner

Hot!

Because of my interest in how art is often perceived and valued in our society, I began to mine porn websites for explicit images where artwork is used as the backdrop. I finally succumbed to the suggestive sideshow come-ons spammed to me daily (“Hot Bi Action!!” “See Teen Anal Sluts take it all!” “Hairy, Hottie, Horny Housewives!!”) and have created pixilated, large-scale ink jet prints from small, digitally degraded jpegs. I use these images with no other manipulation than to crop them to call attention to the background artwork and minimize the sexual acts. This reversal of priorities is often funny as the original photos are taken in hotel rooms and other sites where the artwork is a utilitarian object, an absurd afterthought. In these prints, the sex is deleted and the bodies are incidental, intruding little upon our view of the art.

I have divided the Hot! work included into three major ‘genres’ of art historical painting: Still Life, Portraiture and Figurative. In the case of the still life images, the porn models are absent from the work (I cropped to whatever was present in the background scene). For the portraits, I focused on the face or faces of the porn subjects. And finally, with the figurative works, I expanded the definition of this to include art historical reference. Each of these works features a work of art and whatever residual evidence of the porn shoot remained within the cropped frame. In all cases, the porn was rendered porn-less.

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