Instagram and Facebook can be really weird about nudity. Bare-chested men? Largely fine. Anyone else exposing a hint of a nipple? Much less keen.
It turns out this less-than-sophisticated censorship also applies to famous works of art. So the Vienna Tourist Board, fed up with the strict rules, has given up attempting to promote its collections via those platforms and has set up an OnlyFans account instead.
The app is mostly known for making risqué content available to paying subscribers. But for $3 (£2) a month, art lovers can now explore their favourite nude works by Egon Schiele and Amedeo Modigliani, which were, appropriately, seen as pretty X-rated in their time.
The paintings come from four Austrian museums: the Albertina Museum, Leopold Museum, Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna, which means there’ll be plenty to see.
It all comes after the Albertina Museum was banned on TikTok for showing pictures by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. And in 2018, the Natural History Museum’s Venus of Willendorf figurine – which is 25,000 years old – was deemed too pornographic for Facebook.
There apparently will be – ahem – teasers of these more provocative pieces on their Twitter, but even posting nude stuff on there has been fraught with issues. A Rubens painting was once deemed ‘adult entertainment’, and an Egon Schiele was banned for ‘excessive nudity’. So to see all the full-frontal, indecent, salacious art you’ve really got to head over to that OnlyFans page – or to the galleries themselves.
Heading to Vienna sometime soon? Here are the city’s 13 best museums according to us.