The city of Vienna is adopting an unconventional approach to art regulation, putting its most “explicit” artworks on public display on the adults-only internet portal OnlyFans.
In reaction to the banning of certain creative material including nudity on social media, the Vienna tourist board is now exhibiting art from four of the city’s most renowned institutions on the adults-only site.
Some Austrian museums, such as the Albertina and the Leopold, have lately encountered difficulties while uploading artwork on social media accounts, resulting in the banning of some nudity-themed artwork.
The Albertina Museum’s TikTok account was stopped in July, and then restricted, when it displayed works by Nobuyoshi Araki, a Japanese artist and photographer, that featured a partially-obscured breast.
Instagram said in 2019 that a painting by the renowned Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens had broken the platform’s community standards. When the Leopold Museum celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year, a video featuring Koloman Moser’s work was rejected by Facebook and Instagram because it was identified as “possibly sexual” by the sites.
OnlyFans, a subscription-based website best recognised as a venue for sharing and watching pornographic material, now has these pieces and more of Vienna’s “18+ stuff” on full, unfiltered display.
Vienna is home to “some of the world’s most famous artists […] whose works pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in art and society at the time […] so it hardly comes as any surprise that some of their artworks fell foul of the censors over 100 years ago,” according to the capital’s tourism board.
The fight against censorship continues: with the growth of social media, restrictions like this are now again making news. Nudity and ‘lewd’ material are firmly in the crosshairs of major social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.”
“Vienna and its art institutions are among the victims of this new wave of prudishness,” according to the tourist board, which is why “the capital’s world-famous ‘explicit’ artworks have been placed on OnlyFans.”
OnlyFans, according to Vienna’s tourism board, “shook up social media by giving creators a platform where they could freely share nude and pornographic content with subscribers,” and “shook up social media by giving creators a platform where they could freely share nude and pornographic content with subscribers.”
Subscribers will get a free Vienna city pass or a free ticket to any of the highlighted institutions, where “uncensored pieces of art in question may be viewed in the flesh,” according to the city’s tourist agency.
OnlyFans itself ran into censoring problems in August of this year when it imposed a restriction on “sexually explicit material,” a move that drew so much criticism that it was overturned only days later.