ART NEWS
Pornhub Launches a Museum Guide for Classical Nudes
This Tuesday, the website Pornhub launched Classic Nudes, an interactive guide to all the erotic art that can be found in some of the world’s most renowned museums such as the Louvre, the Met, and the Museum del Prado.
The initiative has a twofold mission: attracting visitors to museums after the pandemic delivered a financial hit to these important institutions and enticing the sex-addled into experiencing art. The guide is latest in a series of campaigns Pornhub has been doing to demonstrate the relationship between porn and the arts. In the last such campaign, Remastured, Pornhub teamed up with artificial intelligence experts to restore century-old erotic films.
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Yet the selection shows how the category of classical art predominantly features white bodies painted by white artists. To balance the overwhelmingly Eurocentric offerings that these museums offer, Classic Nudes also has a category called Another Perspective, which draws on a number of international collections to showcase artworks from India, Japan, China, and the Americas depicting non-white bodies.
Each guide, which can be read at home or at the museum, comes with a map and an audio tour voiced by Asa Akira, pornographic actress and Pornhub brand ambassador. The tours blend history with humor. For example, the text for Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, included in the guide to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, notes that this was one of the first female nudes to be painted since the fall of the Roman Empire. Commenting on Venus’s birth from a clamshell, Akira says: “And if you thought that shell was a symbol for some WAP, well then you were absolutely right. It looks like someone has been listening!”
The scene from The Birth of Venus was re-created in a “safe-for-work” ad for the Classic Nudes guide that features Cicciolina, an iconic porn star, member of Italian parliament, and ex-wife of Jeff Koons. Cicciolina stands in a nude suit flicking through the art guide’s offerings. At the end she reads the Classic Nudes tagline: “Because porn may not be considered art, but some art can definitely be considered porn.”
The video guides are explicit and probably should not be viewed in a museum, or any other public place. MySweetApple, an amateur porn couple, re-creates pieces including Titian’s Venus of Urbino, depicting a woman lounging nude in an occupied living room; Edgar Degas’s Male Nude, a famously sensual portrait of a man in a state of repose; and Jan Gossaert’s Adam and Eve, portraying the moments after the couple bit into the fruit of temptation.
