Fed up with social media sites censoring a naked paleolithic Venus and other works of art deemed suggestive, Viennese museums are showing them on the OnlyFans platform, known for hosting explicit content. An inspired publicity coup on the part of Vienna's tourist board, the OnlyFans account has won several hundred subscribers since its launch last month. But the office's director Norbert Kettner says the move is mostly meant to "start a debate about censorship in the arts and the role of algorithms and social networks in the arts".
Kettner says the idea was born of museums' frustrations at the "difficulties when they are promoting exhibitions" due to the strict criteria some social media platforms use when deciding what counts as pornographic. A notorious example was Facebook 's censoring in of the prehistoric "Venus of Willendorf" figurine on display in Vienna's Natural History Museum, considered a masterpiece of the paleolithic era.
The museum boasts a key collection of work by early 20th-Century painter Egon Schiele, whose paintings frequently fall foul of social media censorship. One of Vienna's other star art attractions, the Albertina, has had pieces in its current exhibition dedicated to Italian artist Amadeo Modigliani likewise judged too "explicit" by some sites.
Kettner says it's almost as if when it comes to taboos around the human body "we are pretty much the same as years ago". It means "the work regains the provocative or even pornographic character that they could have had when they were first produced," he told AFP.
Several social media sites have said their rules on explicit content have evolved and now make exceptions for works of art. However, Olivier Ertzscheid, specialist in information technologies at Nantes University, says despite these ostensible efforts "the reality is that when it comes to the representation of the body especially female bodies nothing has really changed, whether or not it's in an artistic form".
