Art in the grass?

When out and about on my trusty 2 wheeler, heading along a quiet road, I suddenly saw this lady in the grass. To say 'suddenly' is an exaggeration actually, what really happened was that I saw a man pick something up way ahead in the distance. He'd dropped the object and moved along by the time I reached his spot, he'd left it there in the grass, as though his intention was for others to persuse it too. Anyway the whole thing felt sudden to me. The picture itself, as you can see (click to enlarge photo btw) is very mundane soft porn showing a large breasted Japanese woman standing in the doorway of some 'exoctic' location. As with most Japanese 'AV girls'(AV=adult video) their 'managers' kindly take them on trips to places like Bali, Saipan or Hawaii where the girls spend half the time shooting the porn sets and the other half indulging in the main reason behind doing porn in the first place: shopping. British playwright, Mark Ravenhill made a smiliar phenomenon the title of a now quasi-legendary play: "Shopping & Fucking". If you're wondering how I know what these AV girls do in their daily lives by the way, actually I don't, it's pure speculation and I am probably very wrong but I'm not a journalist and I'm not concerned with 'the truth', so I'll let you be the judge of that.

So there lay the torn picture of a Japanese lady, a modern-day geisha of sorts, bathing in the sun, lounging on a grassy bank by a quiet road only to be disturbed by a passing 'oyaji' (old man with connotation of having pervert tendancies). For the 30 seconds or so that he looked at the image did it turn him on or was it painful? Was he plunged back 40 years to the time he too had had his chances of courting some young lady? I'll never know. Then I came along and looked at the picture and it brought nothing but mild monotony to mind. Don't get me wrong I still have lots of desire left in me, but perhaps when it comes to porn I have reached saturation...As a boy, I made furtive glances at the top shelves in paper shops as a boy, lured in by the glossy covers and the oiled-up women posing in odd positions. I went out on walks in the park sometimes hoping to find a fragment of erotica to stir my new-found teenage lust. Then later into my teens and beyone I have browsed porn on the Internet like everyone else, always with that great expectation of finding the 'one' picture that will take my erogeneous mind straight to heaven...still searching for that one (i'll post it here if ever I find it though).

By taking a photo of this found object was I immortalizing it? Elevating it to the realm of art? Or was it art already, even before I arrived at the scene? How many other passers-by had stopped to look at the image before me? Becasue isn't that what makes art art? The gaze. The gaze of the spectator? It used to be the gaze, the gallery space and high society that made art art. Well high society's reign on the nomination of art is long gone and in the last half a century or so artspace has been blown out of the gallery into the 'anywhere' of the world. This grassy bank by the side of a quiet road somehwere in Tokyo, was clearly anywhere, so maybe this was art. An urban installation, unwittingly constructed by the person who ripped out this modern-day geisha of sorts from the book of geishas and left it lying in the grass. In either the case the debate=open...