We are launching this autumn/winter issue of the Erotic Review during Frieze London and Porn Film Festival Berlin, straddling worlds that are usually kept separate and rarely aligned; one is internationally celebrated while the other is considered morally dubious, without artistic or political merit. Yet, both forms are at home with the explicit, push boundaries and both make a lot of money out of desire. The separation that exists between them can be arbitrary, built on histories of shame, control and western connoisseurship. Who decides when art is pornography and pornography is art? What is allowed in one context and not another and why?

Artists have never shied away from exploring our complex relationship to sex and are often at the forefront of challenging societal norms. Art exposes us. Our artist for issue 4, Richard Malone, writes of samplers, “the point of the work is to question our way of looking, our sensitivities to desire.” (p14). Their work has a profound sensuality, it considers the subtle gesture; the shade of the wall on which we hang our aspirations; the movement of a body transformed by unexpected shapes. Theirs is a varied exploration across mediums of how our desires can be stitched together and how we build our accepted standards of beauty.

The Erotic Review integrates the cultural space between art and the pornographic imagination through great writing and artistic endeavour. It’s time to bring our desires, in all their variation, into the light through poetic exploration and open dialogue. We’re not thinking in terms of categories and separation. We’re thinking about the fabric of desire and it’s being woven in our everyday lives. Art allows us to bridge the muddy waters that separate our erotic lives from the rest of lived experience. There’s no higher artistic plane within our bodies.
—Lucy Roeber