Is porn hanging in museums?


“Some of the best porn of all time is not on Pornhub. It can only be found in a museum!”. Actress Ilona Staller, Cicciolina, reminds us in the ad that the leading internet porn company has just launched. With 130 million daily visits, Pornhub has made a curious appeal to its community of users to revisit museums, while assuring that there is hardly any difference between its porn videos and the paintings of naked women that hang in galleries around the world. In the cultural alibi entitled “Classic Nudes” they have chosen some masterpieces from the Louvre Museum and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the MET in New York, the British Museum and the National Gallery in London and the Uffizi in Florence.

It also appears the Prado Museum in Madrid referred to a dozen paintings, including the naked Maja, painted by Goya at the request of Manuel Godoy. According to the porn website that Mastercard and Visa banned – after they confirmed allegations about the distribution of illegal content including rape and underage sex – Godoy was “one of Goya’s premium users”. “In the piece, we see a beautiful naked woman on what appears to be the 17th century equivalent of a casting couch (perhaps cooling off after a good romp with the local bailiff),” reads the Prado chapter of the website created for the campaign.

The text that deals with Goya’s icon also states that Godoy was “a politician who liked sex as much as, well, today’s politicians”. And it recalls, without disrespecting the truth, that the so-called prince of peace and favorite of Charles IV had an intimate room full of nudes built. “It was said that he visited every night before going to bed to give him a happy ending to his day, something like what you do today but with Pornhub,” adds the paragraph adapting the context to his interests. The company’s advertising insists that what you find in a museum and on its website are the same kind of scenes.

The institution directed by Miguel Falomir assures that “the museum is alien to this initiative and, therefore, there is no collaboration” with Pornhub. In addition, they indicate to elDiario.es that they do not rule out the option of initiating legal action against Pornhub.legal issues. “We are in contact with some of the other institutions included,” they add. The images of the paintings are freely accessible on the museum’s own website if there is no intention to sell them. In this case there is no sale, but from the museum they do believe that there is an exploitation of cultural and artistic heritage to “achieve a benefit of notoriety”.

Social unrest

The advertising strategy of the company is very clear: in museums there is porn and porn makes art. The campaign assimilates the gaze of the porn user to that of the art spectator to justify a patriarchal narrative that, according to philosopher Ana de Miguel, provokes “unease in the lack of reciprocity in sexual relations between women and men, and in the commodification and codification of women’s bodies”. In Sobre la pornografía y la educación sexual: ¿can “sex” legitimize humiliation and violence? she points out that “the world we want is not a world in which equality means that men also become objectified, dehumanized and commodified”.

The porn leader doesn’t care if its users revisit museums after the pandemic, but it is interested in them discovering how to justify the use of pornography which, according to a study by Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant(Effects of massive exposure to pornography, 1984), “induces its viewers to trivialize rape”. In other words, for the company, porn can’t be so bad for women if it’s hanging on the walls of museums. What the famous Italian actress says in the ad is what the Guerrilla Girls collective has been denouncing for more than three decades: that women only enter these institutions if they are naked and ready to satisfy men’s gaze.

With the 1989 action Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum, the Guerrilla Girls pointed out that “less than 5% of the artists in the modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are women”. Porn experts conclude that the museum is also porn. The most interesting thing about this campaign is that in their attempt to justify the narrative violence of porn they have exposed the nudity of the emperor. Is Pornhub right when they claim that porn is also in museums?

“Feel with intensity”.

Last February 22, the Museo del Prado ran a live Instagram during the installation of the The temporary exhibition Mythological Passions, in which Alejandro Vergara, one of its curators and head of Flemish painting at the centre, called for more passion in the contemplation of art. He defended this claim while giving the example of that Greek citizen who masturbated and ejaculated in front of what is considered the first sculptural nude of humanity. A copy of that piece was included in the exhibition. In the broadcast Vergara launched a risky question: “What art should do is make us feel and we have to see these things without distance. We have to understand that one of the aims of art is to make us feel intensely, and where is this clearer than in questions related to love, desire, beauty and sex?

Vergara explained that when Titian made reference to Philip II of the episode of the “stain of passion” in the sculpture “there was something of conversation between men”. What Titian called “poesias” (fables) to refer to six classical myths that he painted, between 1553 and 1562, for a very intimate room of Philip II had a “leit motiv” that vertebrates the series: the female nude, exposed to satisfy the desire of the client in his privacy. Art history has tried unsuccessfully to reconstruct an allegorical reading to the good governance of the then prince and has allowed itself to call the rapes of Danae, Calisto and Europa, which happen in these paintings, “deceitful loves”. Although Pornhub has not gone in to make excuses for this historical commission, Titian created an erotic vision from the only narrative element he could stick to, mythology, to satisfy a man’s gaze.

Pornhub also looks at one of the works that has generated the most literature and controversy: Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The painting is the cover of the campaign that the website dedicates to the Uffizi. It speaks clearly to its audience: “As a useful rule, anything you see in a classical nude that isn’t obviously perverted… is definitely intended to represent something perverted”. The object of controversy with this image is Venus’s pose: “The contraction of the fingers of her left hand suggests that, far from covering her pubis, she is masturbating,” Miguel Falomir wrote about the work in Titian’s catalogue, who acknowledges the painting’s “eroticism.” The gaze of male desire has not ceased to dominate art over the centuries and who knows if the interpretations of Cicciolina could be part of museums in two centuries’ time.

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