A Quote by Charles Baudelaire

What is art? Prostitution. — © Charles Baudelaire
What is art? Prostitution.
Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women.
...people like to say things like 'all work is prostitution'. Most work is exploitation, but most work is not prostitution. Prostitution is prostitution, a very specific sort of exploitation... And while I am doing literal corrections to flippant turns of phrase, the earth doesn't get raped. It gets mined and poisoned and blown up and depleted, it gets ruined, but it doesn't get raped.
Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated...The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life... The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution
Besides prostitution, magic is one of the oldest art forms that exist.
Places where prostitution is legal, you find much better health care, fewer cases of disease and illegal abortions. There's really nothing to be gained by keeping prostitution illegal.
What is the difference between a prostitute and a wife? One is a temporary arrangement, the other is a little more permanent. Marriage is a permanent kind of prostitution; deep down, it is not different. Hence marriage and prostitution have both existed together.
Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop. Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.
If you go into it, it is marriage that has created prostitution. And prostitution will never disappear from the world unless marriage disappears; it is the shadow of marriage. In fact prostitutes have been saving marriage. It is a safety measure so the man can go once in a while, just for a change, to any other woman, a prostitute, and save his marriage and its permanency.
Marriage is very secure. It is safe. There is no growth in it. One is simply stuck. Marriage is a sexual arrangement; intimacy is a search for love. Marriage is a sort of prostitution, a permanent sort. One has got married to a woman or to a man - it is a permanent prostitution. The arrangement is economical, not psychological, not of the heart.
The first idea of Young and Beautiful was to have a young boy and to explore the sexuality of boys. But, I realized, with a boy doing prostitution, of course it has to deal with homosexuality. And I had a feeling it was too much for the film, you know, sexuality, prostitution, adolescence ... there were too many films for one film.
It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.
In my theater pieces, I would do "Tits on the Head" - Polaroid photos for $10 on the stage. There would be a line of folks paying me $10 for their turn. It was public prostitution. I turned my whole audience into johns. But because it was in a theater context, an art context, it was socially acceptable.
The ritual sacrifice of children has been taboo for thousands of years. Yet tragically it is practiced every day across our world. We sacrifice children on the altars of our most destructive sins. When the sickness of pornography has run to its most evil and destructive end, it takes the form of child pornography. When prostitution reaches its sickest, most depraved form, it becomes child prostitution.
That's what we were interested in: how power and money ran itself, much more so than 'drugs are bad, drugs are good.' That seems to me a simple moral equation and one you don't have to spend 60 hours of television examining. And I think the same thing is true with how we approached pornography or prostitution. Prostitution's been around since the Bible, and pornography's been around since about 15 minutes after the French guy invented the first camera.
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