Art & Creativity Quote by Peter Sotos

Peter Sotos doesn’t “confess” so much as bait you into deciding what kind of reader you are. The line pivots on a deadpan “naturally” that pretends the conclusion is obvious: if he writes pornography, obsession follows. It’s a nasty little joke with teeth, because it frames compulsive fixation as mere professional hazard, like a chef who can’t stop thinking about salt. The effect is to normalize the very thing most audiences want kept abnormal, quarantined, safely other.

The reference to “the Brady book” (usually read as a nod toward Mathew Brady’s Civil War photography and its legacy of staring at bodies made public) is doing heavy lifting. Sotos links his “introduction” to an “attempt to nail” an “exact same idea,” as if pornography and documentary evidence share a single mechanic: the claim that showing is telling, that the image (or explicit description) carries its own justification. “Since Brady addressed the point” is a sly appeal to precedent. If a revered chronicler already looked, why shouldn’t Sotos?

Subtext: this is a writer building a shield out of intertextuality. He suggests that cultural institutions have long sanctified voyeurism when it arrives labeled as art, history, or truth-telling. By admitting his “obsession” in the same breath as Brady, he collapses the moral distance between the museum and the peep show, then watches to see who flinches. The intent isn’t absolution; it’s complicity, forcing the reader to confront how often “serious” culture borrows the same gaze and calls it enlightenment.