Adam Lindemann has an interesting essay on the prurient in art in this week’s New York Observer. The collector starts by taking several steps back for a running head start by fingering Titian’s Venus of Urbino as a work that turns “the viewer into voyeur.” From there we’re off to Courbet’s Origin of the World and Duchamp’s Étant Donné. Next up is Jeff Koons and the Made in Heaven series:

This series, which was done back in 1990-1991, still remains the edgiest and most provocative sexual work in contemporary art. When people talk about it, one so often hears empty words like “tough,” or the classic housewife’s query, “Where would you hang it?” But in the age of Paris Hilton porn tapes and Pamela Anderson oral-sex videos, why is the Koons work still shocking?

What he does is to de-sexualize sex. He really loved her, and the work is about love and acceptance. Jeff Koons wants us to discard our taboos and embrace the naïve and pure joy of the work. Think of Adam and Eve without the shame of eating the apple. The couple were married, and eventually had a child. Sadly for the artist, this relationship ended in a bitter divorce and custody battle, but for the history of art, a great chapter was written.

Art is a place where concepts are expanded, taboos are broken and history as written is put into question. There is a word for dirty art-it’s called porn. But great art is never porn-even when it’s really dirty.

Koons’s porn art is also significant for the way it pre-figured the importance pornography would come to play in contemporary culture. Twenty years after the Made in Heaven series, the internet has made pornography a mainstream reference point for cultural imagery.

Viewer as Voyeur: A Short History of Perfectly Dirty Art (NY Observer)