Events Speaker Series. About Support Us. Erotic city, come alive Nicole Rupersburg Tuesday, February 5, Jerry Vile is like a kid. An overgrown kid who smokes, says "fuck" a lot and makes sculptures of penises. Except Vile instead has a year-old art show called the Dirty Show -- the largest erotic arts exhibit in North America.
Jerry Vile aka Jerry Peterson is a trickster, a local Loki who delights in absolutely nothing more than flicking his middle finger at convention. There is no structured ideology to it. Vile will describe himself in many ways including the nudge-wink self-designation as " artiste" , but socio-political activist is not one of them. Jerry Vile did not create the Dirty Show because he sought to elevate erotic art on an international level though that was an eventual result.
He did it because he got a digital camera. Editor's note: a highlight of this impressive year run was director Quentin Tarantino using the "Orby" t-shirt in his film, Pulp Fiction.
The character Jimmie Dimmick, played by Tarantino himself, wore the shirt under his bathrobe during a key scene late in the film. Somehow this circles back around to him convincing his friend Rick Manore, founder of the renowned CPop Gallery, to do an erotic art show.
It makes for fascinating conversation, if not a totally linear narrative. Rick Manore has called him "the most important figure in Detroit subculture of the last 25 years. White Noise was his way of getting into shows for free and taking on the punk rock scene in punk rock style. Eventually we offended most of our advertisers," often by making fun of the very same ads that ran in their magazine. We had to go too far. We still did stuff like write about the State Fair but called them 'puke rides.
