There is definitely a lot of art that is "adult" for one reason or other. If I walked into my kids' daycare to see a reproduction of [0] on the wall, I'd definitely raise an eyebrow, and even [1] is probably enough to scare smaller children. We've kind of grown numbed to the iconography, but even as an older teenager I was fairly shocked by a closer look at [2].
The distinction between "art" and "pornography" is also somewhat artificial. It's hard to argue that [3] was not meant to be prurient when the model (underage, by today's standards) shortly thereafter became a mistress of the King of France, based on him having seen the painting. And some stuff that was painted might get you banned from OnlyFans even today, e.g. [4].
But the problem, it seems to me, is that the internet has turned into a place where (1) everything has to be "safe for children" and (2) said safety standards are defined (through US influence, I strongly suspect) to be highly permissive of violence, but super strict on nudity.
yep every time I head to gutenberg.org I'm reminded that it doesn't get any more ironic. The guy was German for gods sake, we invented the printing press and here I am 600 years later getting owned by copyright
Gutenberg making the movable type popular[1] is one of primary reasons Statute of Anne(1710) and copyright was created. It shouldn't be surprising that you are seeing the effects of that.
With movable type printing, the market for books could be widened, suddenly writing and printing presses could go professional, before that it was largely academic. Printers and distributors and writers both became professional and needed their rights balanced and became economically influential enough to get legislature to enact laws to protect both groups.
[1] He was the first in Europe, he didn't invent it first in the world.
> If I walked into my kids' daycare to see a reproduction of [0] on the wall, I'd definitely raise an eyebrow, and even [1] is probably enough to scare smaller children.
I'm not sure this is meaningful. You would also find any fine art unusual in the context of a daycare, regardless of whether or not it's offensive. Your mind is trained to expect bright colors, letters, shapes, etc. in that context.
A better question is, would you expect an art museum to have these paintings in a separate area that requires proof of age to see? And I think the answer to that is absolutely not. That would be weird.
That's far from what your kid can see just watching a few minutes of news. (And I'm not even talking about this email I received from the kindergarten explaining to all parents that kids of this age aren't supposed to watch Squid Game at home!)
What's wrong with those two? These are innocent painting of naked people (also children have no sense of pudency before way after kindergarten so they just can't see the problem with this)
Because automatic content detection suck really bad, and a kid in that position might be detected as child porn by a bot
I've had multiple pics flagged by discord as "graphic" even though none were graphic, the last one was a close up picture of a coin held between my fingers
Hands and fingers always trip up NSFW detection models. We use them for automoderation and a lot of people demoing nail art, close up shots of someone painting etc get classified as NSFW. My guess is that fingers kind of look similar to legs to a CNN model and it appears like naked legs.
TBH I think 0-2 would pass as completely fine depending on the context. #1 could probably be put anywhere and would only scare the most easily scared children. I could definitely expect to see stuff like #0 and #2 at maybe not the corner street daycare but maybe a prestigious private catholic school's daycare would have that nearby.
#3, #4 would just seem out of place because of their nudity. Most sane people would realize it is art but it would still seem weird.
Part of the US's double standard involves being exposed to stuff like the crucifixion and the concept of torture at a very young age. The concept that nudity can be appreciated or even expressed outside of a sexual context is not really a thing in the US. The issue is that the only use cases for nudity in movies & TV is going to sex related 99% of the time because if you are going to show nudity you might as well use it to suggest or depict sex.
I agree that #1 would be considered harmless by most people, and except for the fact that it's still copyrighted would not be subject to a takedown anywhere. As you say, #2 would probably be widely accepted due to the religious context, even though objectively it is quite gory.
I disagree with your assessment of #0. It is extremely gory, repurposes religious imagery in a secular context, and was considered such a menace to society that it could not be shown in museums and had to be hidden for 15 years.
And I think #3 and especially #4 were not meant to depict nudity devoid of a sexual context. With Fragonard, there is often an acknowledged voyeuristic element, even in paintings where there is no nudity, such as https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-honore-fragonard/the-swing-1... (cf also the original French title).
But it's kind of twisted that we consider it less weird to look at a person nailed to a cross than one engaged in a prelude to a reproductive act.
> internet has turned into a place where (1) everything has to be "safe for children
It is not just safe for children. Safe for work too. Safe for people who don't like porn in their feeds too. I think that these filters don't particularly care about high art, because that is insignificant percentage of overall nudity people post. Most of it is boobs and genitals.
The art you posted is all tame. But not all art is tame and like between porn, erotic and art is often blurry.
NSFW is probably quite a lower threshold than not for children generally. I have a couple pieces of art in my house that I definitely would not put up in a work office if I had one, a screen saver on a work laptop etc. I'm not sure it's even so much the case that someone would take offence but that people would be concerned that someone might and/or think (probably correctly) that I was trying to test the limits of what was appropriate for a work setting.
That said, someone will get upset at just about anything.
Yes. But I think that when people chalk it all to kids, they are massively oversimplifying. Because on forum like this it is easier to attack "safety for childer" arguing.
But in reality, people don't want to see erotica and such in their own feeds. The threshold of where it becomes unwanted is different for everyone. But most people want some level of filtering to be done for them.
Plus people want to be able to scroll Facebook or Twitter in work for few minutes without risking something inappropriate shows up.
And lines between art that feels good, erotics or porn, and basically bad art/photo that is super cringy just to look at and disgusting are blurry. And they are also subjective.
Nudity and sexual content was always subject to suppression and censorship, it's just that "fine art" got a free exception for nudity for reasons that I've never seen adequately explained but are almost certainly to do with class.
He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.
“No urns,” he said at last.
“What urns?” said Nobby.
“Nude women are only Art if there’s an urn in it,” said Fred Colon. This sounded a bit weak even to him, so he added: “Or a plinth. Best is both, o’course. It’s a secret sign, see, that they put in to say that it’s Art and okay to look at.”
"The Ankh-Morpork Fine Art Appreciation Society, hem hem. It's just men paintin' pictures of young wimmin in the nudd. Some of them don't even have any paint on their brushes, you know. Shameful." — Guards! Guards! (1989)
"it's just that "fine art" got a free exception for nudity for reasons that I've never seen adequately explained but are almost certainly to do with class."
Because otherwise art is impossible.
If you are a painter, and you need to draw people, you learn to draw naked people because you need to learn how human anatomy works, where various muscles and wrinkles are. In your careers you won't be just asked to draw dudes in T-shirts, you will have to draw or animate people in various clothes and state of dress or undress, torn clothing, gladiator games, etc.
There is great deal of knowledge that they actually have to learn, how to draw realistic deltoids in different body positions, or under stress to show that a person is putting in a great effort to support a great weight, or is in a fight. A drawing by a great artist should make a medical professional happy.
That's why they hire nude models to stand around in various posses, and they aren't all pretty, some of them are old people because they have to learn how to draw wrinkles and old skin.
As far as I can tell, every human culture has some taboos about these things. In my readings, I've never heard of a culture where the base state is nudity and this is unremarkable. Even in cultures where we think they're nude, they're still working their own modesty standards. I am reminded how in some traditional New Guinean cultures, the males wear nothing but a gourd to cover the genitalia. But they're very shy without the gourds. Similarly, there isn't a single culture ever documented (to the best of my knowledge) where lovers don't usually seek some degree of privacy.
Of course, exactly what counts as nude (or public lovemaking) and just how draconian the repercussions for transgression are, varies greatly.
I knew I shouldn't have made a categorical statement, but it's been the rule rather than the exception everywhere with a printing press. Even the much vaunted US freedom of the press ran into the Comstock laws.
> Nudity and sexual content was always subject to suppression and censorship, it's just that "fine art" got a free exception for nudity for reasons that I've never seen adequately explained but are almost certainly to do with class.
This is true only for very unusual definitions of “always” and/or “fine art”; history is more than Victorian England.
Can you name a culture where people don't have some taboo or restrictions about sexuality in art or drawings? It may he more loose or less loose, but it always exists somewhere.
I'm not sure it's Puritan so much as it's modern society's strange desire to sexualize everything while also keeping sexuality behind glass, figuratively speaking.
There is always a problem when you have to apply one set of standards globally. Ideally there would be far more censorship but it would only affect decentralized communities of ~150. Smaller groups can set rules to suit themselves, less so with billions of users.
Or is this a clever art installation in itself commenting on ideas like censorship and views of the human body in modern society? I think this is ridiculously clever!
Austria is fairly Catholic for European standards, but Vienna, the capital, is a major exception. It had a "sexually liberated", freethinking and bohemian reputation already in the 19th century.
Much like the USA, Europe does not fit into neat boxes made of stereotypes.
What I was really trying to do was mention the areas of Europe that are either “sexually liberated” or apathetic to sexuality and equally wont bother anybody or weakly say “it’s not my opinion it’s the advertisers!” because the advertisers don’t care either
I wasn't aiming to imply or say the entire subcontinent is like that
Not sure a better way to do that, even with your observation
I don't know. I used to want to be able to draw like Egon Schiele. Back when I was in art school they had an assignment where you drew a self portrait in the style of another artist so I did Egon. Didn't do the full nude but you know. The guy could draw. Still wish I could draw like that but wishes aren't paychecks.
People taking the subway to work might not want to see all that.
As an artist I avoid sharing over the internet oil nudes, anatomy sketches or artistic nude photography. I made the last attempt in early 2013 trough Instagram. Quickly realizing the big mistake I deleted my account and never come back.
This are the new times. We will adapt as always.
A mob of angry puritans attacked me in the comments and over-reported my act photos for abuse etc. (photos were black & white medium film and abstract as can possibly be - with no nipples in sight and no sexual provocation in composition).
Someone (I assume moderators) deleted my posts minutes after upload.
After several attempts to clear the issue and no reaction from Instagram I decided that it is not worth the effort. Mind you, at the time all influencers were using the platform in sexually subjective ways with no problems at all.
Since then, I don't share on any platform my act photography, painting or drawing work.
It is available only for exhibitions and print medium (albums).
Anyway it's less of a moral thing and more economical. Facebook sells ads next to user content. Anything that advertisers are unwilling to risk appearing next to is on thin ice.
It is grossly inappropriate that we subjugate our entire culture to the capricious will of online advertisers. They are unaccountable, unelected, rife with fraud and not even subject to customer feedback. It's all the evils of both government bureaucracy and free markets distilled into one toxic concoction.
I would rather pay a subscribtion fee for any social network I use, keep the data and decide what I get to see.
I don't think it's necessarily about being puritan.
If images like these, which is by definition art, were what people posted on FB, Twitter, etc., then maybe to a degree they would be allowed on certain platforms.
However the reality is that the vast majority is very hardcore material that should not be allowed. You either allow all or try to forbid everything, otherwise you end up in a mess since many people end up in the extremes, and the sensible content slowly fades away.If you're talking about the culture and society being puritan, I agree, but then again the access to information also drastically changed.To this you also include the fact that by definition facebook &co try to be very globalistic in nature, they also have to adapt to certain "societal norms"(thinking about the eastern ones), where people are way more puritan.
Imo such art being displayed on OF is kind of a shame and a disgrace to those artists, considering the kind of material being posted there.
I am not sure why seeing, for example, the statue of Michael Angelo, might have a bad influence on Children except according to some perverse religion where the human body is somehow bad.
I’m glad that nude artwork is filtered out from the mainstream, because if it weren’t, the art world would become even more faddish and attention-seeking. I can’t even search YouTube for recipes or offgrid videos anymore, because the top results are always a woman in a sexualized pose.
It’s okay to like boundaries. Everything doesn’t need to be blared in your face all the time. Saying this doesn’t make me a Puritan, it makes me in line with most of the people on earth.
HN is a very niche audience. Most of the global population is in China, India, Africa, and the Muslim world (including Indonesia and Pakistan) and the majority of these people do not want nudity everywhere.
As usual, a small segment of Western society deems itself morally superior to the entire world. New century, same old mentality.
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