If people investing in the product or the artist make something not art anymore, then you have to remove the works of Leonardo, Michalangelo and most of the Renaissance and early modern masters from the rank of art, as well as many of the nameless artists of the medieval period. People have almost always invested in art to shape it to their tastes, asking for certain subjects, requesting changes, rejecting initial studies of the artists, etc. etc. I often find those who try to separate art from non-art based on the criteria that someone else paid for it are willfully ignoring the history of art and how it developed. The idea of the starving artist and the true artist staying true to his vision rather than accepting payment or patronage is pretty much a 20th century invention to make a hero of the artist, much the way Washington Irving created hero myths for Washington, Columbus and others in the 18th century. It has little basis in fact but it is the most often repeated and believed ideal about the subjects in question. Unless it is ceremonial or ritualistic art (such as the cave painting and monumental temple art of antiquity), societies did not produce "art" without it being funded by some outside source until societies developed technologically enough for the basic needs of the entire society to be met. Otherwise, everyone in the society was engaged in meeting those needs of survival at some level as their primary task and not pursuing "art for art's sake." The myth of art is so much more romantic and appealing than the reality of art, but in the end it's just another illusion created by artists and those who revere them.

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Art, such as we see it today, is part of an advanced society, and even advanced societies will have their taboos and mores. Sometimes art can challenge those (when a society is at its most progressive) and other times art cannot without severe consequences to the artist (when advanced societies are at their most restrictive and conservative). It varies depending on circumstances and locale, but guidelines such as rating codes are not something new artists have had to deal with in the 20th and 21st centuries, and not even the first time it has been codified by some agency of the society. 

Art however is one of the things that both shapes the society and is shaped by it. Many times it is a crooked or cracked mirror of the society that produces it, and seeing that reflection in the cracked mirror can be a revelation for society that inspires or affects change. Many times things are depicted in art before society is ready to talk about it in a real meaningful way, and it is a precursor to those discussions because it begins the process of acclimatizing a society to difficult subjects. The topic broached in the OP is one of those topics that a lot of people don't like to talk about. It makes people uncomfortable, and seeing it depicted makes people uncomfortable. That discomfort is a bar to the discussions needed to address and process the topic. Art is often the test case and the the gauge as to whether a society is ready to deal with something. If the art gets a backlash, society is not ready to deal with it. Addressing issues of sexual assault, objectifying people and/or sexualizing them, victim blaming etc. is something a lot of people are not ready to see in the crooked mirror of art because it is a reflection part of reality they are not ready to deal with yet. Often times codes, ratings, labels, censorship, and other reactions are societies way of trying to stave off those discussions of uncomfortable topics or ease the process of acclimatizing to them. In many ways, it's the same reaction to the process I sued to see at family gatherings all the time when something uncomfortable came up in discussion, certain words were "whispered" to make them easier to ignore or deal with until people were ready to talk about the (things like divorce in the early 70s, substance abuse/addiction, abortion, etc.) Once it was whispered, you couldn't take it back but watching how people reacted to it was fascinating. Once something is depicted in art, you can't take it back (though some try really hard to make it so), and watching how people then react to it is fascinating. Ideas seep into the public consciousness and become more approachable through art, but the process is painful. Looking at moments in history/art history-dealing with the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the presence of the bomb informed a lot of art throughout the 40s-70s, but it was uncomfortable at first, the Civil Rights movement, the reactions to AIDS in the 80s and 90s, reactions to homosexuality, etc. etc. are all issues that informed art and that art helped to transition into the conversations of mainstream society. Victimization and sexual assault however, have taken much longer, and have received a lot more backlash than some of the others, and several attempts over the years where art has attempted to effect the transition have been rebuffed. Western society is much more comfortable discussing and depicting violence than sex, but when those two things become co-mingled, all bets are off and those uncomfortable with either seem to unite in rebuffing that particular topic on so many levels. 

Ratings are just labels that allow us to name and quantify something to make it safer in the minds of folks who are uncomfortable with it, as people grow more comfortable, the standards on the ratings relax. However, there are some topics that seem to remain lines in the sand, and no label, no art, and no amount of effort seem to be able to breach that discomfort and allow the needed conversations to occur. And when those things start to make people uncomfortable, the reaction by some is to push back those standards on the labels and ratings. It's often a pendulum, and it seems right mow on some levels we are in the pushback mode as a society on several of these issues after a couple of decades of relaxing the standards. How long it will last is unclear, but there seems to be a significant minority (majority? hard to tell) pushing back on the pushback itself. But looking at money and investment as the cause for these changes in content is a smokescreen. It's who is using the money to push one direction or the other that is the key to it, as money can be mode on both sides of the divide on these issues. 

-M

Dupont, you're mixing up your arguments. It's fine to say that the Mona Lisa is a more meritorious work than a Transformers movie; you're not likely to get any arguments on that. But if, as the consensus seems to be, the Mona Lisa was a commissioned work by some wealthy patron, then it's "commercial work" as much any Michael Bay movie.

It's *possible* for all ratings of a given film to be shown on video, though it's a lot less likely for the more transgressive versions to show up in theaters. That's the whole point of pre-censorship, in which directors have to tinker with their films to get the coveted PG-13 or less. However, I have my doubts that every version of any old film gets released to video. It's probably only in those cases that there's some ballyhoo that can be drummed up for a film's alternative R or NC-17 version; otherwise, it wouldn't be profitable. I used to see video stores carry two versions of a work, but now they're nearly dead. How often do people here see two versions of a film available on streaming video?

Of course the Church hoped to profit from the art they invested in, not monetarily, but in growth of influence and prestige in the minds of the people to establish themselves as the supreme authority and only institution that mattered. The Church rejected pieces and forced artists to conform as much if not more than Hollywood investors do in movies like Transformers. If you make a movie that bombs, you don't get investments again, you make a piece that disappoints the Church or doesn't conform to their content standards you face excommunication or worse-imprisonment or death. Livelihood or life itself-which is the bigger incentive to do what the person/institution that patronizes you wants done?

-M