The question for 2004's Seattle Erotic Art Festival, which may very well be the only question that truly matters when it comes to the erotic arts, was simply, "What is erotic?" The question is not intended to be exclusive; meaning, it is not meant to result in the rigid and negative determination: what is not erotic. What is not erotic has very little to do with what this festival is about. The question, instead, is affirmative. It opens (not closes) a very wide door through which a wild profusion of possibilities can pass. If your sexual desires are within the limits of the law, then they should be able to find their way through the door and onto the walls of Consolidated Works, where the Seattle Erotic Art Festival was held this year.
The spirit of the affirmative question "What is erotic?" is, then, democratic. A spirit that aspires to be everything that is permissible--whatever color, orientation, or gender. The goal of this aggressive tolerance is to produce what one ultimately finds on a walk through the exhibition: an orgy of art, a garden of hard organs and flexible devices, a maze of positions (a woman taken from behind by a man, two men in a missionary situation, a standing woman sucking something soft and prone). None of it is too coherent, none of it is either bad or good; it is simply an accumulation of the erotic, a warehouse of images that turn people on.
Sure, Ellen Forney's color-bright paintings of near-naked women standing on beds are good, as is the photograph by De Kwok of a near-naked man wearing a superhero mask and underwear. But with a festival of this kind and size, the traditional value/gallery system (good/bad art) is utterly meaningless. What is important is not that a work of art is the product of a genius or a hack but the degree to which it turns one on. Put directly, the images that stir the senses in and around my penis are much better than those that don't--as far as I'm concerned. And so, though Kwok's photo of the man wearing only a superhero mask and shabby underwear is better art, in the traditional gallery sense, than the bright image of the middle-aged woman sucking/sharing a young cock, in the festival's context of what is erotic, the middle-aged woman sucking/sharing a young cock turns me on and therefore is better erotica.
The door that the question "What is erotic?" opens admits artists first (in the form of submissions) and then the audience (many of whom enter Consolidated Works not to look at art so much as to be looked at as art). They, too, answer the ruling question. But whereas the artist says, "This image of a girl wearing a mask and cape and looking rather vampirish as she walks through the night or a dark room is erotic," the person who is wearing something very tight and revealing says, "I'm erotic."
The Seattle Erotic Art Festival is one of the few art events (if not the only one) where the art on the wall faces a serious challenge from certain members of the audience, who represent the unofficial art, the art that was not selected by the organizers. When the Seattle Art Museum displays the paintings of the French impressionists, for example, people don't show up looking like a Renoir or a Degas; yet this is precisely the case at the SEAF. At one point in the evening, the erotic art that walks and talks and occasionally bends over is as abundant as that which is displayed on the walls. And those who are not attending to the question of "What is erotic?"--and are here to merely observe and be turned on by some of the results--are in the minority.
Indeed, it is this near total condition of the erotic that the festival aspires to; that delirious point at which the erotic is not the exception but the order, the principle--the meaning of everything that is contained within this transient universe of collected and gathered photographs, costumes, and canvases.
