Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall of New York City

Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall of New York City Ballet in “After the Rain.”Credit...Erin Baiano

Also new was Mr. Hennessy sewing himself to others in “Crotch”; I found the show both horrid and haunting — eloquent but creepily manipulative. But Ms. Bengolea and Mr. Chaignaud wielding their dildos in “Pâquerette” were just irksomely coy, along aren’t-we-being-bold-and-don’t-you-love-us-for-it lines. (How I longed for the voice of an English toff to interrupt with “I say, Leo!”)

When I tell friends of these viewings, they inevitably ask: Where is the line between art and pornography? But there’s always been a huge overlap between the two; you can see scenes of copulation on Greek vases and Indian temples. What’s more, many works of art have seemed pornographic without nakedness. Many of us are tempted to talk as if art = good, pornography = bad. Yet that’s wrong too. Much art is poor, while the novels of the Marquis de Sade are pornography taken to a brilliant, horrifying and extraordinary peak.

The overlap between art, sex and nakedness was illustrated — superbly, I believe — in an enthralling, but thoroughly strange show in May at New York Live Arts, when the choreographer John Jasperse presented his “Fort Blossom revisited,” a 70-minute reworking of his short 2000 work “Fort Blossom” (whose title referred to a friend’s tree house). Two female dancers wore short dresses throughout; the men, Benjamin Asriel and Burr Johnson, stayed naked. In one episode, Mr. Asriel and Mr. Johnson lay on each other, in profile to us, sandwiching a vinyl inflatable pillow between them, like an air mattress. The men began to move their pelvises in rhythm.

We were watching a deconstruction of anal sex. The peculiar coolness and objectivity of the scene made it compelling, even poetic — and singularly unsensational. After it ended, and they had lain still a long while, they let the air out of the inflatable, as if it had been a condom.

In a slow duet that followed, now with no object between them, the two men moved together with extreme intimacy — yet only once, briefly, brought their naked groins to meet and only once, at a late stage, held each other’s gaze. Clothed, the choreography would have made no great impact. Unclothed, however, the intimacy was often astonishing. One moment of tender cheek-to-cheek contact involved a cheek of one man’s face and a cheek of the other’s buttock.