"Charles Bernheimer decodes the word “prostitution” in this way: “Etymologically, prostitution
means to set or place (Latin: statuere) forth, in public (pro). When Baudelaire wrote that art is
prostitution, he may have had this etymology in mind, for indeed art is the making public of
private fantasies, the public exposition of one’s imaginary creations.”
-- Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth Century France
“The art business, a trade in things that have no price, belongs to the class of practices in which
the logic of the pre-capitalist economy lives on (as it does, in another sphere, in the economy of
exchanges between the generations). These practices, functioning as practical negations, can
only work by pretending not to be doing what they are doing.”
-- Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods”,
The Field of Cultural Production
When I began graduate school, I also began working in the sex industry as a way to finance my education without having to work full-time. During the three years of developing my work while under the intensive supervision of the institution, I recognized more and more within myself a conflict raging between my “public body” and my “private body”. I became preoccupied with the definition of prostitution as making public, something that is usually kept private. I began to question the conflict apparent in the making public of “naked” bodies in the sex industry but “nude figures" in the art world, “illicit” sexual desires in the sex industry but “legitimate” fantasies or artistic creations in the art world, and “aberrant” sexual bodies in the porn industry but “normalized” sexual bodies in the corporate world of advertising.
My internal conflicts also pushed me to revisit questions about the value and legitimacy given to certain kinds of "work" over others. I am interested in these struggles for legitimacy and how they are played out socially, culturally and economically.
(wurk) n. 1 physical or mental effort exerted to do or make something; purposeful activity; labor; toil...3 occupation, profession, business, trade, craft...5 something that has been made or done; result of a specific kind of activity...f) WORK OF ART
Linda M. Ford
~statement
