Interventions in the public sphere: what kind of pornography destabilizes a conservative reception?

Abstract

This paper discusses the reception of art and literature on the assumption that common sense create a conservative audience, not given to dialectic manners and prone to censorship. It also seeks to evaluate strategies of intervention in the public space from the use of erotic or pornographic themes that destabilize the standard audience. We approach works that are accepted on private consumption and others that move the debate into the public sphere. For this purpose, we read the oil on canvas The origin of the world, painted by Gustave Courbet, and the book of poems Cosmologia do impreciso, written by Oswaldo Martins. Such works, despite the distance in time, led to recent reactions of censorship with the suspension of the Facebook account of the danish artist Frode Steinicke and with the dismissal of poet and teacher of the school where he worked.