If you didn’t already know that your partner was good at poker, ask them who Katja K is? If that draws a blank, try two more of her aliases: Katja Kean and Sussi la Cour Dollenz.

But then again, this is Denmark, the country that became the world’s first to legalise both pictorial and audiovisual pornography (in 1967 and 69), so maybe recognising the name of one of its most famous erotic movie stars is a badge of honour.

And besides, Katja K went on to land a sizeable role in the comedy series ‘Langt fra Las Vegas’, a forerunner of ‘Klovn’, shortly after giving up porn, before going off to study at Roskilde University and have a business career.

Creation of “cool erotic art”
Today, thanks to her column in Ekstra Bladet, the 53-year-old’s something of a media personality (so many Danes have encountered her watching TV with their clothes on at some point), which explains why she has been able to give her latest initiative some serious clout. 

She reckons that much of her work as a porn actress qualifies as art, and she intends to transform certain scenes into crypto art, which will see it converted into non-fungible tokens (NFT).

Furthermore, she intends to revive her porn career by paying homage to classic sex scenes from the movies with her own soft-core versions.

“I’m not making masturbation videos,” she wrote in Ekstra Bladet. “I will be creating .”

Spreading her legs like Sharon Stone
In an interview with  ‘Kulturen på P1’, she elaborated on her plans.

“I’m a 53 year old mature woman, so of course I’m not returning to do hardcore porn. That would be a little strange,” she said.

“I would like to recreate some of the pornography I have worked with in the past. And I would also like to recreate classic sex scenes and references – both from other people’s films and from my own.”

For example, she wants to recreate the orgasm scene from ‘When Harry Met Sally’, but using the sound of her having a real orgasm from one of her movies. 

And she wants to recreate the interrogation scene from ‘Basic Instinct’ (see below), which she describes as a “strong, feminist expression of power”, by introducing some male models to the set-up and having them appear to walk through her legs.

Nice try, but no
Together with Ulrik Schmidt, an associate professor at Roskilde University who specialises in video art, Kulturen på P1 journalist Casper Thrane Dyrholm has been assessing Katja K’s claims that her porn films are art.

Some were produced in LA, while a couple were even produced by Pussy Power, a subsidiary of a fledgling Zentropa – no stranger to porn, as Lars von Trier’s 1998 film ‘Idioterne’ has a hardcore scene. 

However, the pair’s conclusion is that while there’s something interesting about the “distorted image of reality” on view, it’s a flat “no” on whether it constitutes art.

“As a cultural history document, it is interesting. And porn as a form of expression, I could well imagine having a greater influence in art,” Schmidt told DR.

“Not because it should be particularly interesting and daring to draw into art, but to explore what is in the relationship between the basic bodily mechanisms and then the staging in porn.”