From Spanking Art
Jump to navigationJump to search
A vintage cartoon.

In art, the adjective vintage descibes artwork that is "old" (as opposed to contemporary art) — but while old or old-fashioned sounds neutral or slightly negative, vintage comes with rather positive connotations, similar to classic. Etymologically, the term vintage compares old artwork to wine which is said to gain quality with age.

Today, the adjective vintage is usually used for work from the 19th century to approximately the 1930s/1940s. It is perhaps most often used for photography, but can also apply to illustrations and non-visual art forms such as works of literature.

In broader terms, vintage can be applied to almost any man-made item from the past that is preserved, collected, and traded because it holds an enduring nostalgic interest, historical importance, and/or monetary value as an antique. Thus, there is a perpetual after-market for many vintage cars, records, magazines, furnishings, and an endless array of functional and decorative items from the past that appeal to collectors.

In addition, pop culture elements from a few decades ago such as television shows, songs, and fashions from the 1950s and '60s (some might also include the '70s) are also generally classified as being vintage.

Vintage vs. contemporary art[edit]

A vintage F/F spanking photo.
A vintage F/F birching photo.

Every era tends to have, in a way, its distinct style, regardless of the artist. You can usually easily tell a work of vintage erotica from contemporary erotica — even if a contemporary photographer does his best to make his work look like it was 100 years old (a "fake vintage" work). The difference may be subtle and hard to put in words (it's much more than just a matter of black-and-white versus color, hairstyle and costume), but most viewers will be instantly able to tell it apart, which is one of the reasons why original vintage art is still so popular today. (Another is that the copyright of such works will often have expired, putting them in the public domain where they can be freely reproduced for any purpose.)

Stag films and spanking videos[edit]

Vintage pornographic films, which began as silent 8mm stag party loops in the 1920s, also included fetish films of spanking erotica. Most of the earliest examples that still exist came in France. By the 1940s some reels combined sex scenes with bondage, spanking, and whipping. In the 1950s, New York filmmaker Irving Klaw produced a now-classic series of bondage/spanking/wresting film shorts. Many of these featured fetish icon Betty Page. The production of these silent underground adult films (5 to 15 minutes in length) persisted until the late 1970s.

The 1980s introduced affordable video cameras and the videotape cassette recorder (VCR) for at-home use. This decade produced the first wave of full-length spanking videos with color and synchronized sound. Since then, more sophisticated digital discs have become the dominant technology and '80s videos are now generally considered "vintage" artifacts from the bygone era of VHS videotape.