Here's a case. A Cleveland woman news anchor got naked last June for a Spenser Tunick installation. The station squirreled away the footage until sweeps week, then ran it with many a cautionary warning -- just the tasteful bits, of course. Ratings jumped.
Here's a little piece of the New York Times report pf November 25: "Mr. Tunick, who cooperated with Ms. Reed on the report, was unhappy with it, saying that his nonsexual approach to photographing hundreds of nude people in public places - in this case, an installation sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland - had been hijacked to achieve big numbers for a local news broadcast.
"It doesn't do any good for me or for the work," said Mr. Tunick, who has also photographed naked groups in front of the United Nations and inside Grand Central Terminal in New York. "It brings people down to the level of looking at art through the eyes of an 11-year-old. I don't think that people should be teased in a provocative way."
In painting, people after death are naked. This is a universal way of talking about what people are and about what people share. The resonance of that image in sex is one way sex is interesting.
I am not sure Tunick is right, about this doing no good for his work. A lot of 11-year-olds in Cleveland were invited to grow up, to see a celebrity as part of an anonymous naked pile. And the nude in art is often a battleground for the souls of 11-year-olds, a standing invitation to grow up.
Look at the documentary of Tunick's work, Naked States, for a helpful account of how lots of people respond to the request to take their clothes off.
Posted by shea0017 at November 26, 2004 9:54 AM