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So The Federalist, that bastion of reaction and bad takes, has a particularly inane post up now dedicated to the proposition that “Art Shouldn’t Get A Free Nudity Pass Just Because It’s Art,” as the title puts it. Why? Apparently naughtiness has no place in art.
The author of the piece, Meg Marie Johnson, spends a good deal of time trying to prove that nudes in art aren’t just studies in human anatomy; they are, at least a lot of the time, sexual. (I’m shocked, shocked!)
This is a theme she first started to develop in a post last year on PublicSquareMag.org, whatever that is, where she takes aim at the ancient Greeks, famous for their many naked statues. “Whatever anyone might tell you, the ancient Greeks were anything but innocent,” she reports breathlessly.
I grew up hearing the oft-used justifications for the nude sculptures of antiquity and assurances that they were innocent rather than prurient or even sexual. As a kid, I was skeptical of these justifications, but my doubts only grew as I grew older and read more Greek literature.
You may not believe this, but Greek literature sometimes refers to sex. Indeed, she informs us, “sexual humor and references abound in Aristophanes’ Assembly Women” and Ovid’s “Metamorphosis is replete with tales of lust, adultery, and rape.” (Uh, so is the Bible.)
Oh, and also, she adds, there was a lot of sexual exploitation going on Greece. Which I’m pretty sure is a radically different thing than ribald jokes.
In her Federalist post, Johnson again tries to equate sexual references in literature to literal sex crimes, declaring that “somehow we forget that the nude sculptures we idolize were created by the same culture that enjoyed lewd theater and thought raping slaves was acceptable.”
Again, enjoying a bawdy play is not the same as raping slaves. And “lewd theater” doesn’t cause anyone to rape any more than playing video games causes anyone to shoot up a school.
In her PublicSquareMag post, Johnson suggests that most viewers of art are kidding themselves if they believe that nudity in art is different than nudity in porn.
Art may feel different than modern pornography because, unlike modern pornography, art elicits feelings of awe for the expert workmanship and technique.
Maybe she’s watching the wrong porn.
The admiration a work inspires may be confused with a feeling that the featured nudity is moral. We see value in the artistry and think we must condone the nudity to reconcile our appreciation for it.
I really can’t get over the idea that seeing a nude in a museum is the same as watching Bust A Nut In Grandma’s Butt. (Which is apparently a real porn title.)
In her Federalist essay, Johnson is especially bothered by “conservatives [who] have bought into this common notion that, while pornography is immoral, nudity in high art is permissible,” who think that “because art conveys truth and beauty, it must also be good, even when it contains nudity.”
She also claims to have run across conservative men as bothered by nudity in art as her.
A number of Christian men I’ve known have expressed discomfort at viewing nudity in high art. I don’t think they are prudish simpletons incapable of understanding the arguments distinguishing art from pornography; rather, these are honest men who care about honoring God and womanhood.
Afterwards, these guys went home, fired up an incognito window on Chrome, and pulled up HugeTeenButts.com. (I’m guessing. You know how these guys are.)
Weirdly, Johnson is a bit less direct in making her argument in the Federalist post than in her earlier one; instead, she relies on quotes from Leo Tolstoy to make much of her case for her. In his book What is Art, she notes, he rails against “outrageous female nudity” in art and declares that in “all those paintings and statues portraying the naked female body [there is] one definite aim: the widest possible spreading of depravity.”
She offers no evidence (either her own or from Tolstoy) to back up this remarkable claim; she apparently feels that because Tolstoy said it, it must be true, and suggests that we could all “learn a thing or two from Tolstoy’s cynicism.”
I looked up the quotes in Tolstoy’s book (I haven’t read it in full) and, no, they don’t seem to be taken out of context. Tolstoy is pretty worked up about the alleged licentiousness of all art, and he seems pretty down on lust in general. I’m not sure anything this cranky and misanthropic should be seen as the final word on nudity in art–or, really, the final word on anything.
I flipped back a couple of pages in Tolstoy’s book and ran across some other, well, interesting thoughts on the effects of art upon the people:
If it were not for the constant activity of all branches of art in maintaining churchly and patriotic stupefaction and embitterment among the people, the popular masses would long ago have attained to true enlightenment.
Huh. That’s not a quote that would have gotten past the editors of the militantly Christian Federalist. I wonder what Johnson, a recent recipient of a master’s degree in English from Brigham Young University who describes herself as interested in “philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and the gospel” made of this when she came across it. Does she think we should “learn a thing or two” from this particular expression of “Tolstoy’s cynicism?”
In the end, I’m not quite sure what Johnson thinks the implication of her argument should be. While she says that we shouldn’t give art a “free pass” with nudity “just because it’s art,” and suggests that we shouldn’t see nudity in art as “permissible,” she doesn’t call for outright censorship. Indeed, she assures her readers that “I’m not suggesting we take a sledgehammer to [Italian sculptor] Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s masterpieces or erase every living memory of them off the internet.”
Well, you say that now, but when Trump orders drone strikes on Rome’s Galleria Borghese I somehow suspect you’ll come up with some excuse to support them.
I kid, but what exactly does Johnson think we should do about nudes on display in public? Does she want us to put pasties on the nipples? Would she prefer a John-Ashcroft-style coverup? (The former attorney general spent $8000 on curtains to hide two partially nude statues in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice.)
While Johnson’s attack on nudity in art is inept and censorious, I’m going to agree with her that nudes in art are pretty much all sexual, to varying degrees, and that there’s no clear, bright line between art featuring nudes and porn. As British Classicist Mary Beard once suggested, certain varieties of high art might better be described as “soft porn for the elite.” This seems … obvious.
I mean:
And:
Sure, the first painting (Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus) is very artfully done; the second (Bazille’s less-imaginatively named Reclining Nude), is less so. But, as Johnson might say, there’s not much besides artistic technique that would distinguish these images from soft porn.
Then there’s Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World which is, as Kurt Vonnegut might put it, a straight-up beaver shot. (You’ll have to look this one up yourself.)
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with this sort of art–or with straight-up unartistic porn itself, for that matter.
You’ll notice I said “inherently.” I don’t want to suggest that there isn’t anything problematic about porn, or art that is porn, or even about nudity in non-porny art as it exists in our deeply patriarchal world.
But the problem isn’t that nudity in porn or in art is sexy–again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that; I like sexy–but that it’s often sexist. If you look over the course of art history, it’s one dude after another painting nude women, almost always women, and almost always quite conventionally attractive for their day, displayed in a way that’s designed to be pleasing to the male gaze. (I’m not even going to get into what can be problematic about porn; that would require a whole other post, at least.)
Not only that, but the sheer number of female nudes, as compared to male nudes (and to clothed women), reinforces ideas of women as inherently sexual in a way that men are not. In the 1980s, the feminist art activist collective the Guerrilla Girls pointed out the sexism of the art world in a famous billboard:
The Guerrilla Girls were always quite blunt in their art criticism. But not quite as blunt as suffragist Mary Richardson, who in 1914 went after the Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver.
So how do we deal with the heavy weight of sexism in art from the past (and the sexism that remains in the world of contemporary art)? If you’re making art today, and you want to use nudity in it, you do your best not to repeat the sexist tropes that have long prevailed in art. How about the problematic works of art from the past? We don’t need to throw them all away, or dismiss them as little more than degenerate smut; we can appreciate what is good about them, and there is much that is good about them, while keeping in mind their weaknesses.
Honestly, most art and literature from the past is problematic in some ways. As is a lot of art and literature today. That’s a real issue, and a big one, but not necessarily a dealbreaker. You need to consume art with a critical eye. Sure, some art is so problematic it’s impossible to justify consuming today, no matter how expert the painter’s brushstrokes or eloquent the writer’s words. But if you toss out everything that’s not politically correct–from Johnson’s perspective or yours–you’re going to miss out on a lot of the human experience.
Johnson may have studied a lot of art history, but I don’t think she really understands anything about art.
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@ david
That’s a bold claim, but is it though? What’s the evidence there? I would suggest that >99% of art and literature is so banal as to not even raise any issues.
This is an interesting topic though. There’s obviously a lot of analysis at the moment as to why the left seems to have lost the general public. One thing that crops up a lot is the leftish tendency to be somewhat censorious and judgemental. It is a cliche that the left looks for things to be offended by, but I think there is some truth in that.
The right does allow people to enjoy things and feel good about themselves. The left does have a bit of a tendency to be miserable with almost puritanical zeal. Even when people are allowed to enjoy things, it’s with a qualification. We often see “It’s ok to watch this, so long as you acknowledge it’s problematic.” But most people don’t find the things they enjoy problematic at all.
But this is good timing. I’ve been wanting for ages to do a video on Eric Gill and his sculptures at the BBC. They’ve now had to put them behind bulletproof glass.
But they are artworks that could fairly be described as problematic!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly114y8gn7o
Porn *is* art, though. I mean, yes, it exists to cater to “prurient interests”, but in a sense so does art meant to evoke boodlust or foodlust or sadlust or misery-lust, for lack of better terms. The only reason why it’s “not art” in some people’s views is due to sex being “special” in cultures which try to control people’s sexualities, for reasons which made some sense historically but is becoming an increasingly dysfunctional remnant of a fading past.
And of course most of it was always going to be women, given that most men were artists and most men were straight, even ignoring how weird and sometimes violent people could get around even implied homosexuality.
Going forward, I would personally prefer that we get a mix of both desexualized nudity in art and more mainstream sexualization of men, though obviously I can’t control what future artists are inclined to do. Going the route of “chaste” art which eschews nudity entirely is just going to make people neurotic about the human body in general and possibly cause an increase in people with body image issues.
@ snowberry
You make some great points. This is another topic I have all sorts of views on. But I’ll instead stick this video from a much smarter friend.
(Just pretend I said all this)
…most artists were men, I meant. 😓Just pretend I didn’t make a dumb grammar mistake.
I agree. Art should get a free nudity pass because there is nothing morally wrong with nudity.
Well, then, I’ve got some bad news for you, Meg. Turns out that life contains coarse language, violence, nudity, mature subject matter, and scenes of sexuality. (I think it could do with less violence, myself.)
And so are Days of our Lives and As the World Turns. Seems there’s a big audience (and much of it female) for that sort of thing in any time period. Indeed a fascination with the sex other people might be having appears to extend to our closest relatives, Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes. Meg is apparently trying to go against roughly eight million years of evolution and instinct … perhaps she’d be better served by trying to understand why that is rather than by railing against it. King Canute would have better luck trying to turn back the tide.
You can’t honor womanhood by demanding that the most distinctively womanly parts of women must be covered up and regarded as somehow inherently shameful!
They might as well have text on them saying “Miss June, 1585” and the like. And that probably also is backed by roughly eight million years of instinct. Seeing yummy food, lush landscapes, and sexually attractive members of your own species gives you some dopamine jolts for a reason: attraction to these may save your life, give you progeny, and give those progeny a good home capable of providing abundantly for them and the whole tribe. Trying to go against nature here a) won’t work very well and b) won’t be much fun regardless.
And on the topic of even frank, explicit porn: I’m perfectly okay with it so long as it is not degrading in some way: punching down at women, racialized people, trans people, or similarly. (My own preference is for material centering women’s pleasure, with affirming rather than degrading treatment of all involved.)
I’m not sure that any of those renaissance pieces can even be called problematic, though. Individually they seem respectful, rather than degrading; the problematic thing there seems to be how in aggregate they center straight men and decenter everyone else. Of course, absent time travel there’s nothing to be done to retroactively increase the proportion of queer material or material for the straight female gaze that got produced in premodern times. But we can, of course, produce such material more evenhandedly going forward.
(We can also note that there may be a reverse bias with written smut: more of it written for the female gaze than the male, in many eras. Still underrepresenting queer desires, though.)
Right-wingers have been trying to shut down museums for years. Of course I don’t know exactly what plan they’re following, but my guess is that it has to do with the acquisition of property. Museums contain items of great value — just because Meg Marie doesn’t think statues and paintings of naked people are worth anything doesn’t mean nobody does — and in America they usually operate under government auspices at some level or other. The way it’s supposed to work is that the nation (or the state) has wealth, which it invests in art and in other things for the benefit of its citizens, and it administers the citizens’ collections on the citizens’ behalf. So, you can see where this way of doing things flatly transgresses against conservative doctrine. In the conservative understanding of the world, most people aren’t born to deserve nice things. If you can’t pay for it yourself, immediately, then you don’t deserve to have it. (These are the rules for middle-class people and below; upper-middle-class people and above live by different ones.) But there are exceptions to the conservative dislike of museums and schools and libraries (I’m not going to insert any examples here because there are way too many to deal with in a comment on a blog).
One of those exceptions has to do with cultural conservatives and their affection for the idea of Great Art. A good many of them (not all but some) still warm to the notion that in a truly great America, bussed-in schoolkids will be taken on tours of museums by instructors who will open their eyes to the magnificence of life and Western Civilization. The idea is that the kids (in consequence) will not grow up to be brutish as adults. As a group, cultural conservatives seem to want to rule culture more than they want to destroy it. If the museums go down, along with the libraries and after the bookstores, on what canvas can they still hope to make a splash? Their chosen arena will have vanished and they’ll be left with one less sacred space to call their own. (Think how many of them are critics, frustrated artists, and people who struggle to get their one book published.)
The major movers and shakers of the conservative movement snicker at this line of thinking, but they’re far from dead to the presence of art as an opportunity for investment and as a concretion of wealth. What they know is that every celebrated painting hanging in a museum which is open to the public is a painting which is not in the collection of rich man who would be much better suited to made appropriate use of the value it represents than any number of members of the undistinguished mass of humanity. In the eyes of the neoliberal faction of the right, individual collectors are being cheated: they have the money and the intent to buy and the discernment to know what to get. But there the museums are, standing in their way. What to do?
Whatever it is (and I’ve already confessed that I don’t know exactly) the culture-hunger and the worship of tradition exercised by cultural conservatives stands in the way no less than the physical fabric of the museums and libraries themselves. Cultural conservatives want their kids introduced to the Western tradition — even if all of it originated in paganism, cultural conservatives are theologically adept and good at explanations. They’re brimming with answers for their kids. But it’s these same people, IMO, that Meg Marie is going after and targeting; she wants to puncture their complacency. She wants to disentangle them from the snare of the visual beauty produced by craftsmen who were not necessarily believers. So she hits them in what she thinks is a vulnerable area — their prudishness. She goes for the short-hairs, so to speak. She says (in effect): “Folks, you wouldn’t let little Joshua look at online porn and if you knew he was doing it you’d stop him. But the images he’d see online are not too much unlike the ones he might glimpse in a display of traditional Western art. If the one is bad, then the other must be bad too. So how do you reconcile letting your little boy see nipples in a big lighted room when you wouldn’t let him stare at them on a screen? Marble and pixels are both representations; in that way there’s no difference between them.” Then she follows up with an appeal to the kind of authority cultural conservatives are supposed to respect: “Do you know that Tolstoy agrees with me?” (Case closed, or such is the intent.)
I can’t say how well this ploy is going to work, but what I will say is that it shares the overall Marxist vibe one senses in most neoliberal productions. Neoliberals think of themselves as the antidote to Marx, but he lives rent-free in their heads. Marx argued (I’m simplifying) that in most societies, moral strictures are put into place as ways of achieving economic ends. And neoliberals, to whom financial goals are the only legitimate kind, are doing everything in their power to prove him right.
Tolstoy was in no small part a man of his time. The “Christian men” that Meg Marie cites are seemingly men of Tolstoy’s time as well. And therein lies a problem.
The easy fix for this is… don’t allow any more new female nudes till they’re equaled by the number of male nudes.
I seem to remember that young Tolstoy was always beating himself up for going to brothels, so I imagine his pearl clutching has a lot to do with self-loathing and shame regarding sexuality.
(in a social sense I’m sure there was PLENTY to feel guilty about frequenting brothels in that era, as I doubt they were staffed by financially empowered individuals with a whole load of control over their destiny, but I imagine his shame was more spiritual)