ART and pornography have had a long and rocky relationship. The economics have always made sense — painters from Caravaggio to the Impressionists have used sex workers as models because they were affordable and willing to pose in ways that women in straight society would consider inappropriate. (Egon Schiele is said to have supported himself early on essentially by selling his drawings as child pornography). Similarly, Zak Smith's sometimes harsh impressions of the lives of his sex worker friends are beautiful. Smith's ongoing series of portraits of "girls in the naked girl business" documents the array of gorgeous punk chicks who populate alternative porn websites and films. Rather than show them in their professional context, he depicts these women in their homes and cars, amid the detritus of their lives. They are pornographers in a feminist mold cast by Bettie Page and Nina Hartley — women who display their sexuality on their own terms. Though those terms may involve sadistic, violent and degrading behavior, Smith seems to view them as sexual deities for whose favor a mere mortal like himself would be most grateful.

Smith is best known for drawings and paintings in acrylic on paper such as "Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated," a hit of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, for which he created a drawing representing the action on each page of Thomas Pynchon's delirious novel. "100 Girls and 100 Octopuses," 2005, is a composite painting made up of small interlocking drawings that describe an ornate bathhouse/palace where said girls and octopi cavort lasciviously. The work, inspired by Hokusai shunga paintings in which women mate with cephalopods, and by contemporary hentai comics along the same lines, is a labyrinth in which figures and rooms come together and fall away into colorful fields of geometric abstraction. This was followed by "Drawings from Around the Time I Became a Porn Star," in 2007, which are included in Smith's 2009 memoir and drawing collection, We Did Porn, published by Tin House Books.

Despite the frequently graphic accounts of casual intercourse with multiple partners, We Did Porn at its core is a love story. Smith, single in Brooklyn, ventures into alt porn in a quest for sex with attractive, punky women. He finds it.

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