Gene Youngblood (1943-2021) wrote Expanded Cinema and was an inspiration for the culture of the Internet in his famous essay Mass Media and the Future of Desire, 1977. In a Portland lecture, the recording of which was lost, he proposed a venn diagram of art within a circle and not-art without. No one would argue that the Mona Lisa and David are safely within the center of the definition of art enclosed by that circle. What is interesting is the boundary for an individual, a subculture or tribe, and how it varies over time.
Viva Las Vegas is a writer, musician, and a dancer. Her work, over years, is an intellectual exploration of sex work, social politics, and the experience of exotic dancing. Thank You for Supporting the Arts her film biography.
We live still in the Victorian age, in a puritan land, immersed in the media of beauty to sell soap. Our brains engage neuro-aesthetics formed from birth. In that neural wiring, emotion is entwined too. Viva Las Vegas is interested in how that all unwinds performing, and in individual personal conversations, in the club. The film is her explanation of how dancing is art within the circle.
PICA put together a fine exhibition of the history of sex work politics in Portland, the community of workers, and their artworks. https://www.pica.org/events/symposium-art-activism-publishing-sex-work. Oregon's famous First Amendment of the Constitution of 1857 is stricter than the federal one of 1787. In State v. Robertson, 1982, stripping moved into the circle of legal, from outside, not-legal, in Oregon. Now the line between art and not art is increasingly being discussed for the variety of sex work.
Film Thank You for Supporting the Arts https://hollywoodtheatre.org/events/thank-you-for-supporting-the-arts/ at Hollywood Theater 7:30PM $10
