"clickbait" Alert!

Wikipedia:Pornography

This page documents some of the discussions the Wikipedia community have had regarding matters related to pornography. While there is no formal policy, the Wikipedia:Profanity guideline has the advice:

"Words and images that would be considered offensive, profane, or obscene by typical Wikipedia readers should be used if and only if their omission would cause the article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate, and no equally suitable alternatives are available. Including information about offensive material is part of Wikipedia's encyclopedic mission; being offensive is not."

. . . and so it is with this blog.

"clickbait" & the use of Art and/or Pornography

Abduction!

This image, a painting by Évariste-Vital Luminais is used in an article published by History Ireland, Ireland's History Magazine, in May/June 2009. The title of Luminais' painting is "Norman Pirates in the 9th century". He is best known for works depicting early French history, and so the type of subject matter Luminais chose for his painting, along with many other historical subjects, led to the artist being sometimes called "the painter of the Gauls".

Slave Traders 

The article in History Ireland is headlined The Viking slave trade: entrepreneurs or heathen slavers?, and is referenced in a Cargo of Questions page in the Ceatharlach Information Wrap - Arrivals.

The relationship of the LODE Re:LODE project to information remains critical and questioning, hence the requirement to contextualise the presenting of such information and imagery in this way.

For example: It may have some contextual value to access information about the artwork or artist being used as documentation or as an illustration.

Évariste-Vital Luminais

So, this page addresses the use of imagery as "bait" in the particular information environments encountered in the LODE Re:LODE art project under the heading:

"clickbait"

Update: Acceptable versus Unacceptable?

In this article the discussion on Pornography comes before Art - Up Front!

Pornography - the depiction of prostitution

. . . . a street in Rome.

Prostitute is derived from the Latin prostituta. Some sources cite the verb as a composition of "pro" meaning "up front" or "forward" and "stituere", defined as "to offer up for sale".

The depiction of slavery . . . at the slave market.

Up front . . .

. . . and behind

"clickbait"

A new "portmanteau" word from the 1990's, combining "click" on the link, as with hypertext and hyperlinks, with "bait", as in to "entice" or "entrap" our attention whilst browsing on the internet.

Baggage?

The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in "Jabberwocky", where slithy means "slimy and lithe" and mimsy is "miserable and flimsy". Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the practice of combining words in various ways:

You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.

In then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections.

This kind of imagery is clickbait, and along with our short attention span, there comes a lot of baggage. 

Hence the need for some kind of annotation on the part of this project for the reproduction of this archival imagery.

Jimmy Wales - Pornographer?
FAKE NEWS!

Art coming behind Pornography?

"clickbait" & "Classical" subject matter?

The "seductive atmosphere" - Nana

"clickbait"
On stage & on display in Bon Marché & the brothels of Paris

Les Fleurs du Mal
Flowers of Evil

Frontispiece for Baudelaire's collection of poems "Les Fleurs du Mal" 1857 by Félix Bracquemond

— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

— Hypocrite reader! — My twin! — My brother! 

Orientalist art is classic "clickbait"!

Why is this painting being used to illustrate the Viking slave trade?

"clickbait" and the White Slave Trade

"clickbait", slavery, commodification and capitalism

"Clickbait", misogyny, the internet and Incel

"clickbait", Helen of Troy, Marie Antoinette, Sex & the Incel story

"clickbait" & "anti-clickbait" 
Q. Soft pornography and political resistance - is this a possible scenario?

The freedom to offend?

"clickbait" - The artist's model is NOT a "muse"! Or a coat stand!

Portmanteau

You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.

Humpty Dumpty (from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll)

A portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections (As an example of late dadaist/surrealist "performance luggage" see clip from the Marx Bros "Night at the Opera").

The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter, "to carry", and manteau, "cloak" (from Old French mantel, from Latin mantellum). According to the OED Online, the etymology of the word is the "officer who carries the mantle of a person in a high position (1507 in Middle French), case or bag for carrying clothing (1547), clothes rack (1640)". In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like.

From "Portmanteau" to "Porte manteau"!

The female model as "clothes horse"?

A frame on which washed clothes are hung to air indoors, also known as a winterdyke or a clothes maiden.

Or

A person who is excessively concerned with wearing fashionable clothes.

Man Ray, 1920, The Coat-Stand (Porte manteau), reproduced in New York dada (magazine), Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, April 1921

This is the work by Man Ray referenced by Greer. The connection with the Lewis Carroll reference at the beginning of this commentary is, as they say, "surreal".

Time to take a voyage with the Marx Brothers . .

Fin