The anticipated Sex Cells opening on Friday; appropriately, this picture was taken with a cell phone. — Photo by Kevin Armento

If the jaded critic George Jean Nathan was accurate in his assessment that “art is the sex of the imagination,” off-limits to moralistic judgment, than what could be made of an exhibition in which sex is the art? Purveyors of photography, technology, and surely voyeurism gathered Friday night at 3rd Ward for the anticipated opening of “Sex Cells,” the experimental showcase of cell phone sex/art.

Roughly seventy-five images were on display in the three gallery rooms — which were packed for much of the night — representing all of the submissions sent in. This non-discriminatory approach, while surely fulfilling the spirit of not being judgmental, made for quite a range of photos indeed, from the artistic, to the amateur, to the barely-discernible. This presents a conflict: one wants to support the idea of a free-for-all, throw-them-all-up-there-and-see-what-you-get sort of project, but at the same time, one can’t help but note that a more thematic presentation might have been more interesting.

But what of the images themselves? There is an engaging dichotomy on display, split pretty evenly down the middle: the artful and the voyeuristic (and here is where more thought could have gone into presentation). On the one hand, you have poses and arrangements that were clearly intended for submission. These are the pictures of handcuffed-ankles and the subtle bulge-in-the-jeans, some of which included a written artist statement below the images (things like: “This piece reflects…”). Then there are the pictures that seem plucked from a real person’s cell phone, the ones we have really come to see: there is the lonely woman on a bed, enticing a lover with half an exposed breast. A close-up of a dude holding his junk, erect, with the text below: “can i see you before i leave tomorrow?” The latter set of photos gets to the heart of what such a display is (or could be) about, plumbing with more allure the “intersection between technology and eroticism” that is the project’s stated intention.

In another room, video is projected onto a full wall, mixing together pictures of children and general innocence with inserted frames of submitted video and imagery (mostly penises), and which was apparently edited by Tyler Durden (no credits were mentioned).

The people at 3rd Ward know how to keep an event lively, and with the addition of a bar with cheap drinks (that had a long line all night), live music in one of the gallery rooms from Unicornicopia, and a snow cone truck outside, the opening night never felt dogged down in that stuffy “gallery-opening” feel, so much as, say, the art display section of a fun county fair. And with an abundance of sex pictures on the walls around us, a party is more fitting anyway, because there is an extent to which you have to laugh to enjoy these pieces, as much or more so than taking them seriously.

So perhaps, in this case, it is the other way around, and sex is just one art of the imagination. Or is it just something fun to look at? Or purely exhibitionist? Or more cynically, is this the future replacement of traditional photography, with the medium equalized to an extent where there is no line between amateur and professional? Maybe there is room for both, and a more hopeful stance could be taken, as it was put in one of the artist statements: “Cell phones may be the death of us, but they allow a lot more spontaneous documentation of our daily lives.”