It is often not the subject that scandalises us, but the way it is framed. The same human body can be Venus in marble, or a poster on a backstreet wall; the same sentence can be poetry, or provocation. What changes is not the flesh or the word, but the gaze that shapes it.
While ruminating over the experience of viewing some paintings at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai recently remembers an incident from many years back. I was at university, chatting with a small group of friends in the library about books and I mentioned Nabokov’s Lolita. One friend, half-genuinely and half-provocatively, asked, “Why should that book be considered a classic and not pornography?”
I remember answering without hesitation: “In the same way that a painting or photograph of a nude may not be pornography.” I could not have unpacked the thought then, but I knew I was right. Several years later, after many books, exhibitions, experiences and conversations, I maybe able to explain what my younger self only intuited.
The difference, I realise now, is not in the subject but in the treatment. Pornography is concerned with arousal; art is concerned with awakening. One is engineered to provoke the body, the other to stir the mind, to open a space where reflection can enter. Nabokov’s novel, for all its disturbing subject, is not an invitation to desire but a dissection of it – an exploration of obsession, self-justification, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive our own moral landscapes.
Art history is filled with similar tensions. A Titian nude, an Amrita Sher-Gil study, even certain works by Picasso – each depicts the naked human form, yet none collapses into vulgarity. As John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing, the same image can be erotic, sacred, or exploitative depending on the frame that surrounds it – both literal and cultural.
Philosophy has circled this question for centuries. Kant, in The Critique of Judgment, distinguished the pleasure of beauty from the satisfaction of appetite: beauty is appreciated “without interest” – we savour it without the need to possess it. Freud, from another angle, might have called it sublimation – the transformation of primal instinct into something layered, symbolic, and socially resonant.
Lolita is unsettling because it makes us witness the coexistence of beauty and moral rot, side by side, within the same sentence. Its prose is a lattice of light and shadow, each page demanding that we hold both in view. That is the enduring power of great art: it does not flatter us with easy certainties, nor shield us from what is uncomfortable. It stays with us precisely because it refuses to let us look away.
An ordinary life 