Perversion, its allure

"The number of perverts involved in the field of art is probably much greater than the average for the population in general ... It can be supposed ... that the pervert inclines in some particular manner to the world of art." --Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, 1985

"It is usual for most normal people to linger to some extent over the intermediate aim of looking that has a sexual tinge to it; indeed, this offers them a possibility of directing some proportion of their libido on to higher artistic aims. On the other hand, this pleasure in looking [scopophilia] becomes a perversion (a) if it is restricted exclusively to the genitals, or (b) if it is connected with the overriding of disgust (as in the case of voyeurs or people who look at excretory functions), or (c) if, instead of being preparatory to the normal sexual aim, it supplants it." --Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905

"The most common and the most significant of all the perversions -- the desire to inflict pain upon the sexual object, and its reverse -- received from Kraft-Ebbing the names of "Sadism" and "Masochism" for its active and passive forms respectively." --Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905

"First, perversion is the result of an essential interplay between hostility and sexual desire ... Second, people with perversions feel (are made to feel) an unending sense of being dirty, sinful, secretive, abnormal and a threat to those finer, unperverse citizens who are supposed to make up the majority of society. Third, the word itself reflects the need of individuals in society to keep from recognizing their own perverse tendencies by providing scapegoats who liberate the rest of us in that they serve as the objects of our own unacceptable and projected perverse tendencies." --Robert Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, 1975

"We also find many versions of anal defiance, the urge to exhibit excrement and to flaunt it before the eyes of the world. In some exhibitions in London there was a great show of 'dirty knickers,' underpants with faeces, piles of excrement on the floor made to look very life-like. We can take this to be a defiant gesture of the self which has been made to feel dirty and bad by parents and by the 'clean and ordered' world at large.
The narcissistic self that wants to be admired and loved but encountered rejection or disgust is hitting back at its tormentors, gaining revenge by outraging them with obscenities and by breaking their rules ... Indeed, what is the meaning of old bits of iron, broken chimney pots, old bicycles, fragments of machinery, unwanted sewing-machines and such like exhibited as sculptures? They obviously serve to disturb and outrage the onlooker by claiming artistic significance for what most people regard as discards. We see here a declaration of war against the cultural Superego, a demand for a right to express any impulse previously considered taboo. Sublimation itself, the very foundation of culture, is declared a barrier to freedom, an instrument of repression.
This new kind of libertarianism is not at all what the founders of modern art had intended." --George Frankl, Civilisation: Utopia and Tragedy, 1990

"Kitsch is perhaps most clearly visible where love poetry changes into pornography ... perverting the infinite goal of love ... into a series of finite sex acts ... Whoever produces kitsch ... is not to be evaluated by esthetic measures but is ethically depraved; he is a criminal who wills radical evil." --Hermann Broch, Evil in the Value System of Art, 1933

HOW perverse are you? Enough to be an artist? I'm not perverse in my sexual habits, but I love to read about it. I would never eat shit, for example, but I would be fascinated by a real-life or fictional character who did. Or by art that represents it, like that big machine that produces a turd, or that piece with various containers full of the artist's actual crap. What makes us so ready to be titlllated by the weird? Maybe we find it funny. Does that mean we find it uncomfortable or disturbing? I think we like it because it it involves us in a conspiracy to transgress smug authority -- it flies against our notion of good manners, polite society, bourgeois ideas, the propriety of being grownup. The way kids love fart jokes. Perhaps that's where the artistic and the revolutionary spirit springs from: our childhood love of fart jokes. Artists are people who never outgrew their fondness for fart jokes. Why do kids love fart jokes? I have no idea, but they all do. Anybody know why? Pray tell what you think. It might give us all a Major Insight into Art.