Name: Post Porn Modernist Manifesto
Author: Véronica Vera. Also signed by several others.
Thesis: Sex is a positive thing. Sexiness ought to be embraced in art. Let's be sex-positive.
The Post Porn Modernist Manifesto was authored by a porn star. It's three most prominent signers are another porn star, a high-class stripper, and a man. Unsurprisingly, it's focus is on embracing sexiness in art and making sexiness part of art. In this way, it resembles the lesser-known Post Seafood Buffet Manifesto, in which two hungry sharks, a kitty cat and a sushi enthusiast argue for embracing the consumption of tasty fish as an important part of art.
Despite getting an entry in the Wikipedia page for "Art Manifesto", the manifesto's name appears a paltry 225 times in a Google search, suggesting that it's way less important than whoever added it to Wikipedia thinks it is. (Since it's an art manifesto, it's by definition less important than its authors think it is.) Since a bunch of those hits are Wikipedia mirrors, it's hard to really get a bead on what the manifesto contains, and it doesn't appear to be online.
For a vaguely feminist art manifesto, PPMM isn't half bad. I don't want to sound like I'm biased against feminist art manifestos, they're just usually some horrible mix of nonsensical, incomprehensible, and raging against issues that only exist in the mind of their creators. PPMM, on the other hand, has a clear point and it gets to it. I'd almost go so far as to say that, at least compared to many other art manifestos, it actually deserves a little bit more acclaim than it's gotten. Or maybe not, since it's just a porn star trying to pass it off as art.
If you do want to see hilarious levels of art-person snobbery related to the PPMM, check out this little number, written by one of the male signers of the manifesto. Really. A dude thinks there should be more naked strippers in art. You don't say.
Speaking of Frank Moore, the author of that bit, independent candidate for president, and a dude who signed the PPMM, I'm pretty sure that if I'm Véronica Vera and some gross old guy says he wants to sign my "more naked times in art" screed, I'm turning him away. I mean, gross. If Moore wasn't thinking "all rights, naked chicks in art," I'm assuming that he was actively trying to undermine the whole thing. I mean, nothing reinforces your call for additional sexiness in art like the approval of some dirty old man. Notably, Frank Moore was an independent candidate for president of the United States, but since he has no information on his candidacy anywhere, I assume he was a candidate in the same sense that I was - he declared himself a candidate and zero people cared. (Zero people caring is the theme of this AMR post.)
To be perfectly fair to Moore, who is just a simple artist who happens to like naked times, he might have been intimidated by the manifesto's author, who appeared in both "Tattoo Vampire" AND "Latex Lovers." (As well as "Consenting Adults," which unless I'm missing some kind of pun, is the least wild porno name I've ever heard.)
Significance - 1 - Essentially nil. Gets fewer google hits than "boots ahoy," a phrase I made up trying to think of something that would have fewer google hits than the name of this manifesto.
Self-importance - 3 - It's hard to get a bead on this, because it's not available online anywhere, since it's actual importance is so low. Still, the excerpts that appear online don't seem to suggest any special level of self-importance in the short tract.
Naïvete - 3 - Other than calling something that seems to have been completely ignored by everyone except one Wikipedia editor a "manifesto" and believing that anybody might care, there's nothing especially naive about the PPMM.
Incomprehensibility - 2 - Great work, PPMM. You're written in normal English by what was probably a human. There's some flakiness in there, but there's also a point, and PPMM gets to it.
Got an art manifesto you'd like me to review? Drop me a comment.
