Delingpole: Nudes Are ‘Soft Porn for the Elite’ Says Cambridge Professor Mary Beard

Nude art is ‘soft porn for the elite’, Cambridge classics Professor Mary Beard warns in a BBC2 documentary apparently contrived to make men feel bad about looking at naked bodies.

According to The Times (of London):

The academic said she still adored looking at masterpieces such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, but believed that people should challenge themselves to consider the circumstances of their creation.

“I think western art has centred on a sexualised version of the female body more than other cultures,” she said in an interview with Radio Times. “And I think it’s about opening our eyes to it and saying, ‘What is this? Is this really soft porn for the elite, dressed up in a classical guise?”

Most Renaissance nudes were commissioned by men to be enjoyed by men, she noted. “Where does that leave the female viewer? One of the things we are trying to say is, ‘On what terms can I enjoy looking at a naked woman whose image was drawn and painted, let’s imagine, for the pleasure of the male customer?’”

Men taking pleasure at the sight of the naked female form? No shit, Michelangelo.

Beard’s point, it seems to me, is at once epically banal and fantastically bossy.

Since when was it the duty of any man to allow his appreciation of a painting like, say, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to be tempered by some rancid, killjoy guilt-trip imposed on him by a white-haired Cambridge classics professor?

Since when did admiring the female form join the banned list?

The fact that Beard deigns generously to concede that “I don’t want to not look at that” and that the Venus of Urbino is a ‘great painting’ doesn’t render her argument more powerful; just more hypocritical, outrageous, and impertinent.

Of course, it really should go without saying, there is a titillating element to naked female bodies.

Yes, obviously in the era before Pornhub, nude art was indeed one of the few ways of legitimately circumventing strict social and religious mores, “dressed up” as the good professor says “in classical guise.”

Really, though, so bloody what?

We appear to have a new Puritan age where, instead of being encouraged or even allowed to appreciate art on its aesthetic merits we must now view it through a filter of tortured, identity-politics-driven guilt.

Instead of celebrating beauty we have to focus on its potentially dodgy connotations, like kids being exposed to the horror that their parents still have sex.

Now art is to be defined in Current Year by how woke it is, and if it is not woke, defined by the woke dialogue it provokes rather than the beauty of the work itself.

There is nothing illuminating, attractive, entertaining, amusing, or edifying about this interpretation of art.

Nor is it one that anyone not a prisoner of woke values would wish to share.

But of course, the BBC has given Mary Beard a two-part documentary to expound on this subject — (horrifyingly, at one point, the 65-year-old strips off to pose as a life model for a drawing class) — because everyone who still works at the BBC thinks in exactly this way.

Most of its viewers don’t, though. Which is why the organisation is doomed.