Art is Being Censored, and None of Us Are Surprised

A week ago, Vienna, Austria's tourism board announced that it was starting an OnlyFans for its local museums because their posts containing nude art keep getting censored on social media platforms.

Look, I don't want to be that person. . . but I'm going to be that person:

We told you so.

Sex workers have been talking about online censorship of erotic content for years. We’ve had our social media posts removed, accounts banned and suspended, and content algorithmically suppressed, for ages. We have said that increasingly puritanical internet censorship is going to affect the art community again and again and again and again, and yet all of these fine art lovers continue to distance themselves from erotic entertainment and decry porn as exploitative schlock for the uncultured masses, ignoring the obvious indicators that their art is not immune from the same suppression that adult entertainment faces.

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shunga print by Utagawa Kunisada, c.1830

But guess what, cupcakes? Porn is art, too, whether you like it or not. Art doesn’t have to be “fine” to be art. Do you really think Dadaist toilet bowls or sea shanties or commedia dell'arte were considered “fine art" back in their heyday? Really?? Yet now we call them art!

Art is media created to elicit a reaction from its audience, be it joy or sadness or amusement or anger or horniness, and porn is media created to elicit lust. You can put “Olympia” (above) in a gilded frame and blather on about the elegance of Japanese Edo-era woodblock printing, but Manet’s model was still a sex worker, and shunga is still vintage hentai, and you bet your butt cheeks that John Donne made literate Englishmen tug at their breeches when To His Mistris Going to Bed was published in 1654.

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excerpt from "To His Mistris Going to Bed" by John Donne

So let's stop pretending that our communities play by separate rules. Suing PornHub for parodying classic art pieces isn’t going to stop Facebook from censoring Venus of Willendorf, and insisting that your naked, hand-colored daguerreotypes are totally not the same thing as iPhone titty pics isn't going to keep Instagram's auto-mods from flagging your posts.

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Hand-colored daguerreotype

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Photo from "Alone" gallery feat. Sonya Blaze and Roberto Blanco

If you just take a few seconds to stop vilifying the adult entertainment industry, you just might notice the elegant composition of this photo from Vixen’s "Alone", the clever comedy in WoodRocket’s parodies, or Hidori Rose’s meticulously crafted ero-cosplays. After all, our strap-ons are a lot prettier than the giant phalluses in Lysistrata.

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Hidori Rose as Projekt Melody

I’d say, “Welcome to the club,” but those in the art community are already members. Time to accept the invite, pay their dues, and join the fight for free speech.