AMEA // World Museum of Erotic Art » News

12″OfSin – Call for artists

Admin — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 22:31:48 +0000

Las Vegas’ Sin City Gallery announces the launch of its international erotic art competition 12” of Sin: So Much Art You Can Barely Fit It All In, seeking the best in sophisticated, intelligent, and clever erotic art. Featuring a jury of experts from around the world, the competition will culminate in the exhibition of 25 finalists at Sin City Gallery and the selection of winner in February, 2012. All the original work in this show, intended to be an annual competition and exhibition, will be under 12” in every direction, a limit designed to push the artist’s boundaries because, like they say, it’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it!

The winner of 12” of Sin will have his or her work featured in a later solo exhibition at Sin City Gallery in Las Vegas. The winner will receive a trip to Las Vegas to attend the solo exhibition’s “Meet the Artist” cocktail reception. An art book featuring work from the winner’s solo exhibition and the 25 finalists will be published and available for sale during the winner’s solo exhibition and at the next 12″ of Sin’s annual exhibition.

Project link: www.12ofsin.com
Here’s the submission form
Or read AMEA’s interview with Laura Henkel, owner and curator of Sin City Gallery first

Exhibit: Hans van der Kamp

Admin — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 02:10:38 +0000

Hans van der Kamp: They tell me I produce nudes or erotic photography, while I look at my works as portraits. If a nose tells us something about the person portrayed, why should any other body part be less informative?

Click here to visit the exhibit

Click here to visit the artist’s website

15 years AMEA

Admin — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 01:53:50 +0000

1995 or 1996?

Actually we are not really sure what the exact day was that AMEA emerged on the Internet. Some claim the site started earlier than 1996 because the oldest file, the 1930s dancing girl to the right had a time stamp of 1995 and was found on a hard drive of a 386 Windows PC.

So AMEA must have started either in the end of 1995 or the beginning of 1996, making it hard to pinpoint its anniversary. We ended up picking July 17th as the anniversary, since this is the birthday of Hans van der Kamp, founder of AMEA who is still with us as consultant and curator of this virtual museum.

A joke

What we know for sure is that AMEA was started by Van der Kamp as a joke. Or even a form of protest of the founder (calling himself “a group of artists”) who was at that point in time spending most of his hours on one of his other projects, a Dutch online literary magazine that kicked off earlier in 1994.

In 1994 very few Dutch authors believed that the Internet was anything more than a nuisance, or at best a hype. Some of them were still using typewriters and texts were hand delivered and quite a bit of text had to be retyped before it could be published.

Also the motivation of the editors was low and one night none of them showed up on an editorial meeting. Van der Kamp decided to spend his evening creating a parody on the then very popular membership sex sites. He created one page with a lot of golden keys on it, created one exhibit and one picture of the day.

This mini-site was named AMEA // World Museum of Erotic Art. Van der Kamp simply could not think of a name that would better mock erotica sites.

The golden keys on the front page were supposed to be linking to the largest collection of erotica ever, while in fact there was nothing there. However the picture of the day and the exhibit were a success.

At that time search engines and directories like Altavista and Yahoo were trying their utmost to be family friendly. Altavista was less scrupulous and was gaining ground on the directory of Yahoo, where actual people handpicked links from the web.

Since Amea was not so hardcore as most sex sites, Yahoo decided to link to it as one of the very few erotica sites they allowed to be listed in their directory.

Amea became an overnight success and Van der Kamp was forced to come up with the exhibits and remove the golden keys. From then on the number of visitors increased dramatically, mostly due to the many publications in newspapers, books and magazines worldwide.

Van der Kamp who is also an art photographer has often stated that 15 years devoted to one site is simply too much for him, so this year will be his final year.

To honor our founder we have chosen to exhibit his works that are currently on display in the controversial new Moscow Museum of Erotic Art: Tochka-G.

Click here to see the exhibit.

Photography: K Leo

Admin — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 05:27:57 +0000

[ Click here to visit the exhibit ]

K Leo: We live in a freakishly marvelous world. I am perpetually amazed at the places, faces and precarious situations that surround us all.

[ Click here to visit the exhibit ]