Michael Donovan
All the articles about Tumblr’s incipient, self-inflicted death, pro and con, focus on Porn with a capital P. Left out of the public discussion is non-pornographic art involving nudity or sexuality… which, as a trip to any museum on Earth will quickly prove, is a substantial portion of Art as it has always existed. With the demise of Tumblr there is no real place to discuss and share *that* on the internet anymore.
Pause for a moment on that thought, please: the Internet is the most powerful communications tool & visual platform ever invented by humans (by some orders of magnitude)… but is seemingly incapable of providing a simple safe haven for society’s most precious asset, art.
No bookshop would think to block all books containing any sexuality from their shelves. No cinema would prohibit movies from showing “female-presenting nipples” across the board. Despite the oft-cited but purely theoretical difficulty in determining what is porn and what isn’t, in actual practice it turns out to be quite simple for a given movie theatre to show the one and not the other.
I can only assume that the people who run Tumblr are phiistines, & lazy phiistines to boot. For these sins they’ll pay the severest penalty capitalism offers when their site throws itself into the dustbin of history on December 17th. Perhaps someone with more courage will pick up the tattered, NSFW banner of Culture & lead us forward, hm? Fingers crossed.

