Artists, listen up. Don’t change your art–just show a little skin. The nude has a long history in art as being provocative, symbolic, realistic, and many other things. Go one better, and use naked people not as some prettified, distant nude in a painting, but as naked people. Articles are still pouring out about Abromovic and MoMA, but now they are mostly about the use of two naked models in a doorway- a genre begun by Jerry Saltz, picked up by the NY Times, and now hawked by any widely-read publication for a general audience.
Abramovic herself is all but forgotten sitting there in her chair below. Don’t worry though, this could work if you aren’t (yet) an internationally known artist with a decades long career. Case in point: work by Brian Reed at Chair and the Maiden Gallery in February. The show got plenty of street attention, and even made the NY Times when a model in the window, wearing only something between a mobile and a spiderweb on her head, was asked by police to step down.
In terms of attention-getting, naked is the way to go. It is an amazingly effective and simple technique to get more people, some who don’t even like art, to look at your work. Or is it nude? Whatever it is, it can still raise people’s, ahem, hackles.
I knew I needed something!
Another idea: the children’s game “Look”, involving displaying chewed food on the end of one’s tongue. Ooh, I know, I naked woman, chewing stuff, sticking her tongue out periodically.
It all starts to sound like the Monty Python skit with the “nude woman in a bathtub holding a bit of your string, with a Bishop standing beside the bathtub to take the curse off it”.
I’m a bit nervous because I look at all those statues from antiquity and you know what is broken off nine times out of ten. Just male insecurity showing through 😉
Newsweek copied my blogpost this morning: Naked News http://www.newsweek.com/id/236977!
Well, at least kinda copied my thought. Strange coincidence.
Bill, the combination of your comment with ArtSparker’s is too funny. I have a whole song and dance number imagined now!
In this unsophisticated part of the US where I live it would be “nekkid”… 🙂
Currently at MoMA in NYC Marina Abramovic has some nude pieces– with live human nudes standing nearby as part of the art piece. I am glad you came by and left a comment on my blog.