by David Hughes

Created on: October 23, 2008

As a longstanding member of the deviantart.com community, I've seen quite a lot of anthropomorphic drawings, or "furry" drawings as many people call it. Whether a person hates it or loves it, both sides are very opinionated. While anthro works are not necessarily bad, I can't say that they're art in the sense of producing something original to the artist. Anthro serves more to the senses than to art.

Anthro art is comprised of three elements and not just two. It goes without saying that the first two are the human body and the animal body but deviantart.com has yet to find an anthro piece that doesn't utilize the third, which is the idealized, perfect form of the first two. The furry is always handsome or beautiful to someone's fetish. Nobody is going to draw an anthropomorphic blind cave salamander with a disfiguring face rash unless someone likes that sort of thing.

However, this in itself does not negate its artistic value. The artistic nude (especially the female), whether to titillate or astound, is almost always meant to provoke some kind of reaction in the viewer. However, a fox-girl in a bikini can't hold a candle in provocative value to a genuine artistic nude. The reason for this is because furries are so widely commercial.

Much like pornography, anthro art is mainly meant to provoke a single reaction in the viewer. Unlike pornography, however, it is creativity just on the most basic of levels. The furries are usually categorized as characters for works of fiction, but they are rarely thought out in terms of complexity, motivation, and goals. Their sole purpose is to be anthro characters, to be idealized, sentient creatures that could never exist in the real world.

There is a great deal of anthro artists with impressive mechanical skills in the field of drawing or whatever else they use to create the characters. This is not to say that they wouldn't do an excellent job of following someone else's orders in the professional world. Still, what makes an artist truly an artist are the ideas behind what comes out on paper.

If someone has a great idea, it's going to show in the drawing to at least someone if it's drawn well. Not very many people outside the anthro community are seeing the big ideas behind fox/cat/horse girls other than the artist's intent to provoke a reaction in his or her audience. While it is art in a very borderline sense, it's most certainly fetishism.

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