Deborah Lutz & David Salle, Pleasure Bound

Artist David Salle in conversation with Deborah Lutz, professor of Victorian culture and literature at Long Island University and author of The Dangerous Lover, who reads and discusses her book Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism on March 1, 2011 at The New York Public Library as part of their ongoing series, Art and Literature.

The conversation with the renowned artist David Salle and moderated by series curator and senior librarian Arezoo Moseni explores the lives and works of Victorian pornographers, sex rebels who exposed the dark side of Victorian London. The work of these artists uncovers troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women’s emancipation, the dissolution of traditional religions into more personal expressions of faith, and the pressing need to expand accepted forms of sexual expression. These were artists and writers who gathered together to create sexually themed art, thus highlighting the eroticism of collaboration. Keeping in mind the notion of collaboration that has come back into the art world recently, Lutz and Salle consider the aesthetics of collectivity.

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