Some time ago, I saw a Fetlife post that stuck with me. It was a joke about those guys who post pictures of their dicks next to TV remotes, apparently imagining somebody might find such imagery compelling. The post was funny and any sane person would have chuckled at the joke and moved on. I am not a sane person. And a big part of my artistic project involves thinking deeply about smutty nonsense. So I ended up writing two thousand words on the subject of TV remotes in dick pics. Why? Because when you peel back the layers, there’s actually something really profound at the core of this conversion. The reason nobody likes to see a TV remote in a dick pic is because it violates a fundamental—but often unstated—principle of photography. Let’s dive in.

Our culture has been stagnant, aimless, and repetitive for more than a decade. Or at least it sometimes feels that way, with so much mainstream art focused on nostalgia, and modern cinema dominated by remakes, sequels, prequels, and reboots. And while it’s certainly true that lots of indie artists are sharing exciting work on social media, the most provocative contemporary art is often doomed to obscurity; algorithmic feeds have a tendency to flatten culture, weeding out anything too strange or ambiguous in favour of an endless stream of unobtrusive, unchallenging, and easily replicable sameness. In spite of this, there is one niche where the spirit of the avant-garde still feels alive and well: fetish art.

Some of the most novel, vibrant, and radically transgressive contemporary art is not being shown in galleries, museums, or prestigious art fairs. Even mainstream social media platforms—ostensibly a democratizing force for art and culture—are either censoring, overlooking, or shadow-banning the most unorthodox developments in the art world today. If you want to find provocative imagery nowadays, you need to be keeping an eye on last niche where the spirit of the avant-garde is still alive and well: fetish art.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has been mired in controversy since its opening night. As the story goes, the play’s first performance in 1953 was met with jeering and anger from the audience. “This is not theatre as we know it,” remarked one critic. Another dismissively characterized Waiting for Godot as a play in which “nothing happens, twice.” Nowadays, the piece is widely regarded as a masterpiece of absurdist theatre; however, critics remain staunchly divided in what, exactly, they think the play is trying to say. Here, I want to advance a somewhat controversial perspective: I think Waiting for Godot is a kinky gay love story.

How should we distinguish between art and pornography? The question might appear frivolous at first glance; however, I would argue that this particular philosophical conundrum has acquired urgency in our current political climate, with fascism, prudishness, and moral panic on the rise around the world.