This weekend someone asked me the question: What is the difference between porn and art?

My first, initial response was Hustler vs. the type of erotic photography we show in our gallery section. But before I opened my mouth a little voice whispered, "But that stuff turns you on way more than Hustler does, and you like girls."

"Individual differences of taste," I answered, shrugging.

I walked away quickly, for I had smoked way too much pot to even begin to try and think it through anymore.

Porn has one function: to turn people on. Art, on the other hand, has many functions: social commentary, emotional commentary, record of our lives and time, etc. But you can break it down to being the same thing as porn: that it's simply meant to arouse. Whether a piece of art can arouse anger, fear, happiness, despair or desire, doesn't matter, it's the point of what it's trying to do. So when you break it down art and porn have the same fundamental function.

And often, they even take the same form.

Naked women.

But read Rachel Kramer Bussel's essay "Posing for Spencer." In it she says: "For me, the shoot wasn't about nudity or sex per se but about art, about the way that our bodies, which often cause us so much pain and trouble, can look to an outside eye, unadorned. In the few moments I had to glance at everyone, I realized how gorgeous we are in our natural state… " Most likely this is exactly what Spencer Tunick is trying to do with his art.

Which some people could view as porn.

We aren't the first culture, by any means, to have had this debate. We can look as far back as the Ancient Greeks, a culture known for their nudes in paintings, texts, and, of course, statues.

Think about ancient Greek pottery, the type with a border showcasing naked men and women in sexual posses, even orgies. To me, these don't seem like porn, they seem like art. In ancient Greece, art was meant to show athletic prowess, perfection of the male and/or female body. Meanwhile, these orgy vases were only meant to show desire, and to arouse sexual feelings of pleasure in people. One hundred and fifty vases survive that portray figures in the actual act of fucking.

And what about those Chinese fertility statues that peek coyly out of every other window in Chinatown? The man lifting up his robe to expose an erect penis pointed right at the upturned ass of the woman kneeling in front of him? These are meant to arouse the fertility right out of you, meaning simply the sperm and the eggs.

The reason that these two examples were not seen by the general population of ancient Greece, nor everyone in China (although you do have to wonder…), was because they were for "adults only." Their sole purpose being to arouse sexual feelings.

Like our Playboys and Hustlers.

Who knows? Maybe in thousands of years people will look at these "ancient texts" of ours and see them as art. Maybe the need for copulation will have disappeared entirely and only these records of that part of our culture will exist. Turning pornography into one of the purest forms of art ever created by mankind.