That's a very modern application of those words. The very act of creating a statue is (true) objectification, whether it was carried out due to respect or solely to titillate. I'm not convinced that both cannot be true of the same statue.
And the modern concept of pornography means very little when framed in a pre-Judeo-Christian world. I doubt any of our loin-clothed ancestors shared the shame-based perspective 21st century humans have on the human body. No doubt some statues/drawings of vulvae were made because vulvae were fun things to interact with, and some were made because they were meant to be revered; I'd argue that it's possible for some percentage of those works of art to be motivated by both respect and eroticism, and further that the two motivations need not be considered so inherently at odds.
Making a statue in ancient times wasn't cheap or easy. Cheap in the aspect of always living on the edge of life, where a bad season could decimate a living group, and having time to do so. Easy in that tools weren't readily available to get it done quickly. I don't think anyone was just swinging in a hammock on a lazy Sunday - there were no lazy Sundays.
From that you can most likely assume that statues had purpose and significance. They weren't just put up for titillation which is really all modern porn is today.
It follows from your argument that because our ancestors didn't share an evolutionary perspective, modern humans describing our ancestors in evolutionary terms is less meaningful.
Put another way, when modern humans describe the process of objectification, it matters not at all if the objectifier says to themselves "I sure am making an object out of this".
It really doesn't. People can relate to porn in many ways. Unless the definition of "objectification" is so broad as to make the statement meaningless.
that's way too general. There's enough pornography out there, recent and old, where people are just having nice sex without there being some sort of power/dominating relationship nor where things get objectified to the extreme.
what exactly do you mean by this?
The main counter to this is that it's fiction and the actors are consenting adults, and that the only material difference between porn and other crappy fictional films is prudish judgment of (primarily) women's sexual behavior.