X-Art (0)
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| Status: |
Current Member for over 1 year (at the time of review).
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| Pros: |
- All attractive models, mostly well known, although many are now mainstream porn performers without quite the same class.
- Usually avoid models with bad piercings and tattoos, when they do use tattooed models they do a pretty good job of hiding them.
- As far as I can tell, there are no models with breast enhancements.
- Good archive of some of the most beautiful photography I've ever seen.
- Site doesn't seem to time out. When I first joined I stayed logged in for several days while downloading the old material.
- Easy navigation and basic search facilities. All updates are clearly dated.
- Big clear thumbnails on updates & model pages.
- Very active member community, with lots of comments.
- Multiple sizes and resolutions of photos & videos, up to 1080p, although I only ever download the highest.
- Streaming available.
- No logos on films, very small logos on photos.
- All content seems to be exclusive.
- Plenty of material, around 400 films and rather more photo sets. |
| Cons: |
- Very slow and unreliable downloads.
- Little variety of models - almost all white, slim, 18 - 25.
- Model bios are a joke, even more so than most sites.
- There has recently been a huge increase in the volume of material, and a great drop in quality control.
- Some photo sets still very good, but an increasing number of out of focus & poorly lit sets.
- The voting is blatantly fiddled, with all updates being posted with large numbers of 10/10 votes
- Comments are pre-moderated, and while they allow through some mild criticism there is much more leeway given to those who follow the party line.
- Over the last year the material has become much more sexually extreme. |
| Bottom Line: |
Don't get me wrong, X-Art was good, but there are now serious issues.
It is odd to find a major site as slow and unreliable as this. I never get much more than 200 KBytes/sec (every other site I am on maxes out my internet connection at 2 MBytes/sec), and it often takes several attempts to download. I travel a lot and am home briefly, and often don't manage to download the backlog. There are several films I never have got downloaded - this is using 3 different pcs, 3 different browsers, and several internet connections - I've even tried in hotels (which I don't like doing) with no improvement.
The technical and artistic quality of the films has dropped a lot recently. It has gotten so bad that there are a lot of complaints on the site, but in reality it has been dropping for several months. This isn't just about the bunch of films released that are supposedly HQ but are very pixelated and really very low quality, in general the quality has dropped. Obviously no-one looked at the films before uploading them. There have been several films released with terrible lighting problems, including one that was completely unwatchable due to purple lens flares across the entire image. The film editing has become very basic, and many films don't even end smoothly with a fade to a "the end" screen, the film just stops suddenly 1 second after the action finishes. Clearly much less time is being spent in post-production and no checking is being done at all.
It seems strange that site blog keeps boasting of how quickly they are producing material. They say that large numbers of films & photo shoots are being done in a day, clearly with little preparation. Almost all the updates are produced in one house in Malibu, or one studio in Prague. The same sets are being used over and over, and the updates are clearly being filmed in a few minutes with minimal attention to detail. There is no longer any scene setting, they just put people in front of the camera and make them get on with it. Many films just have one camera from the side doing a longshot, and one from in front doing a close up, and all they do is cut between the two.
The voting is a joke. Many sites pump up the votes a bit, but this site is ridiculous. Updates appear around midnight, and have between 30 and 100 10/10 votes. They give more 10/10 votes to the more extreme material which is what they prefer. It means that the site, rather than the membership, is choosing what is more popular. It also makes the older material, when they didn't do this, seem poorly rated. Members can make up a new name whenever they comment, and I get the feeling that some people are having conversations with themselves, or putting up multiple positive comments for the material they like. There are a suspiciously large number of comments with female names which never appear again, especially on the nastier material. The moderation of the comments is uneven, and it is noticeable, for example, that comments insulting members who don't like anal are allowed through while responses aren't. The pre-moderation and blocking of anything that mentions other sites in a positive light is comical, as Colette recently went onto SexArt to take advantage of their lack of pre-moderation to advertise and try to poach members - when she got a negative response she became very aggressive and made wild allegations. Eventually SexArt, who are very tolerant in their comments, had to remove most of the thread.
The material has become much more sexually extreme, and a significant portion of the recent updates are clearly aimed at the mysoginistic male mainstream porn market. There is a lot of anal now, several DPs and rough looking facials, and the blog shows that this is clearly the direction the site wish to go. A lot of the current material just looks harsh and aggressive and like mainstream porn. Material like this used to attract negative comments, it doesn't any more apart from a couple of sad sounding members. Either the comments are blocked or the old members from the artistic days of a few years ago have left.
X-Art was the benchmark glamcore site. Over the last year or so it has left this behind, and is now marginally upmarket mainstream porn. I say marginally because good mainstream sites wouldn't put up the technically poor films that have been posted recently. If you are coming from regular porn, looking for something that seems a little classy, you may well like it. If you're coming from erotica, and fancy something a little more explicit, or have seen some magazine articles or adverts and are considering porn/glamcore for the first time, SexArt or Joymii would be much more likely to suit. I find little artistic or erotic on here now, and my wife will only watch films if I have checked them out first. My annual membership is coming to an end (it's my second time on the site), and I won't be renewing. |
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