No, it is not a porn site. It is, or was, a major site used to display aspiring artist's work. Years ago I used it to locate a artist for a couple of book covers, but the artist's success quickly priced himself out of my budget. When I had advertised there (they have a forum for such things) I drew considerable flak for daring to suggest that I pay $40 for a book cover. Since them I have used various other options for my book covers, but novel fifteen is proving tough to get a cover for, and with 66k words of rough draft in place I decided it was time to try again. I posted in the forum, this time offering $50, and braced myself. Instead of rancor over my low price, I was deluged with interested artists (most without skill). Looking through the site, there is a lot of really awful art there now. Still, if you are looking for a reasonably price cover, they seem to be much more open-minded these days.
Fetish art, sexualized fan art, and bad art really has saturated the site in recent years. Just trying to find a piece of nice art for a desktop background is a Herculean task; which led to me abandoning Deviant Art for Google image search, which is better for the task of finding desktop backgrounds.
I used to be on deviantart. Not anymore, for some reason. I agree with both of you, there seems to be a lot of bad stuff. But, there's also a lot of great artists on dA. Just need to find the right corner(s). Regarding covers: whenever I'll need a book cover, I'll make it myself.
I don't draw, but I do use Deviant Art on a regular basis to order character art. I've found that there are still plenty of good artists willing to work for reasonable prices. I've been doing this for two or three years, and $40 would be quite low for a book cover you actually intend to distribute, especially if you're ordering traditional hand drawn art. I've paid that for a cheap pseudo-cover to attach to manuscripts for beta readers, but the good quality hand-drawn covers I've seen run over $100 - which sounds pretty fair to me given the amount of time it takes to create something that's quality. Personally, I like to pay a fair price for work, and $40 is about what I'd pay for one color digital painting of a character with no background - and I know for that price I will probably be working with someone who's just trying to break in (which is fine with me because I like supporting amateur artists and people with less experience cost less - everyone is happy). For a full-color cover on something I'd actually want to sell, I'd prefer to pay more for a quality, experienced artisan who is going to take more time on it, and as such, is going to charge more for that labor. Art is hard work, and it should be paid for as if it's work - it's also easier to charge a fair price if there are a lot of potential buyers on the forums, that's economics - rising demand increases the equilibrium price. As for the content of the site - it's a free public fan community for people to post art, let them post art. Of course you're going to see "bad" stuff from less experienced artists - they share their stuff, gain experience, and produce better stuff. And yes, if you don't limit your content, people will submit content that includes sex - that's life. Personally, I've been quite happy with my experience on Deviant Art the last few years, and I've encountered some really talented artists who are really good at taking stuff I'm struggling to visualize and turning it into visuals - which have then improved my writing (I think it's great to consult artists who think visually rather than in words when I hit a snag worldbuilding or writing descriptions.) Just this week I got some great art of a really visually challenging character, and it's helped me break through on how to think about and describe my futuristic setting. There's a lot of stuff to sort through, but you can still find really good stuff if you're willing to sort through it and pay a fair price.
With the name DeviantArt, I'm not all that surprised it began to produce deviant art, if you take my meaning.
I would recommend elfwood.com, but the site has been down for about two years. But you should have seen some the art on there, plenty of it would blow you away with what people can do with oil on masonite. I have seen paintings that look like photographs, that is how good the artists were. (Fantasy/Sci-Fi art and stories). Deviant art I think is just a bit more open to random nonsense and photography and pornography. Kinda the whore of the art world, if you will. But there are some decent artists on Dev, but you do have to spend a fair amount of time sifting through shit, to find some artists that are of a good quality. Or you can be picky and look up artists on google (or other search engine), and see if you can find a professional artist to do your cover art. But you better be prepared to pay 100-500$ depending on the artist and their prowess. Just another option for you. Good luck with what ever you feel like doing for your cover art.
True, the name of the site is much more apropos now. Still, I could've gone without seeing sexy fox-ladies my whole life.
I agree that there is still talent on the site, but they are getting buried under scans of sketches done on notebook paper.
