I go along with the early Dadaists (Zurich, 1916-ish) who wanted to destroy "Art" with a capital "A". They saw it as an elitist label created by the bourgeois to keep everyday people out. (The most famous examples of how they tried to do this are: Marcel Duchamp exhibiting a public urinal at an art gallery, or scribbling a moustache on the Mona Lisa with the subtitle "She Has A Hot Arse".)
I think the purpose of art, music, literature, film, dancing & performance (whether erotic or not) is to express ideas and feelings about what it is to be you living in the world today (whether "today" is prehistoric cave-painting times, or the modern industrial world). It's not particularly useful dividing things into boxes and saying "this is valid because it's intellectual but this isn't 'cause it comes from the heart or the groin rather than the head".
This is why I find it interesting when people break down the barriers between what is supposedly "high art" and what is supposedly "low art".
I think the Dadaists would've wholeheartedly approved of Annie Sprinkle's 'Public Cervix Anouncement', where she encouraged members of the audience to look at her cervix through a speculum.
THAT's absolute realism. All the artifice of respectability and traditional bougeois morality have been stripped away in that one performance.
I find that "erotica" is sensual and silky and gives me sweet dark fantasies to masturbate to under the comfort of darkness (it's an escapist pleasure like watching a romantic comedy with a box of chocolates and a bottle of wine) but I'm fascinated by the direct no-bullshit cut-to-the-chase realism of hardcore uncensored "pornography".
We are most true to our primitive animalistic selves when we are eating or fucking. We all like to eat and we all like to fuck but some people are afraid, because of our repressive history, to admit this to others, or even to themselves. They're the ones who want to ban pornography, keep the "great unwashed" working classes from the art galleries, look down their noses and feel superior cause they understand "Art".
These are the people who most need to be sat down between Annie Sprinkle's parted thighs with a flash-light to study her beautiful pussy spread open with a speculum.
"Cunt" is what the snooty classes are most afraid of. But Cunt is more important, more creative and more beautiful than "Art".
Ok. Time for breakfast, I think.