Zen; a similar argument comes up anytime someone speaks of the current censorship or banning of books that is going on in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. It is stated that there is no censorship because almost any book can be purchased through Amazon or other commercial sellers. But these are being censored and banned in many school districts and even a number of public libraries. As Arty suggested, there is a good deal of censorship that happens on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. I think we all understand that any online platform has the right to establish rules and limitations to what is posted... but often these guidelines are not clear and not followed equally. There are so-called "influencers" who post images and videos that are not far from what one might see in a strip club that serves alcohol and requires the dancers be "clothed". So they wear something the size of a postage stamp and grind right into the patrons' faces. Facebook... and Instagram often look the other way with such. But an artistic nude photograph such as this...
...or even paintings with a nude are frequently deleted and often lead to the deletion of the account. The paintings of Peter Paul Rubens... the Flemish master from the Baroque era (1577-1640) were targeted by Facebook censors to an almost comic extent leading the Belgian Department of Tourism to make this satirical video:
Nudity and sexual imagery certainly exist in American culture... but there are a good many from both side of the spectrum who would rather it didn't.
Howard Tullman is a collector of contemporary figurative art and owns quite a number of nudes. He touches on some of the politics of nudity in art in an article published in Artsy:
Artsy: Often, the nude gets tangled up in politics and censorship; it gets called pornography or blasted by political correctness. There is a lot of cultural effort in America to suppress nudity despite freedom of speech. Your thoughts on that?
HT: I’m discouraged that a lot of really good artists aren’t taking advantage of the broad distribution possibilities of the internet and how inexpensive it is to get their work seen, because of exactly that censorship issue.
... museums, by and large, are pretty modest about how much nudity they will display on a regular basis. And museums have very few contemporary realist nudes.
I was at a group exhibition at a prestigious small museum in California, and there were a few nudes in the show catalog. But when I got there, nothing on the walls. I asked one of the organizers and they said they didn’t want to hang art that made anyone uncomfortable.
Tulmann went on further to point out that no one questions why an artist chooses to focus on landscapes, or still-life... but it is different for the artist who paints the nude:
When any artist, male or female, paints a nude some judgement gets put on it that’s always unfair. If men paint women they are objectifying. If men paint men they are gay. If women paint women they are lesbian.
I have personally experienced this bias against the nude in art. I was invited to exhibit with a couple of other artists at the college where I was taking a course to be applied to my continuing education hours for my teaching job. The following paintings were accepted by the jurors and the gallery director:
At the last minute, one of the college deans had 5 of the paintings pulled from the exhibition. Only
Magdalena (the first painting on the left, bottom) remained. I have no idea how this one painting was chosen to remain. The dean, however, argued with the artists in the exhibition, the professors in the art department, and the gallery director, stating that the school was a public institution and he did not want to offend anyone. This same school has several nude life-drawing classes and drawings from these line the walls. Many seem to feel that drawing from the nude is a hold-over from the Renaissance. One is learning how to draw from observation, but heaven forbid one thinks to continue painting or sculpting the nude as part of one's oeuvre.
I attended an art school that required 2+ years of life drawing after the nude... but I was the only student who continued to draw and paint the nude. No one ever questioned me to my face... but then again, I'm rather big and might have intimidated many students. There was a girl who painted a series of romantic nudes of her boyfriend and herself. These were quite conservative... and yet she got attacked for painting "pornography".
I think the issue of nudity in art is quite complex.
