CULTURE The Conversation
Matt Elton: What inspired you to make a documentary
on the subject of nudity?
Mary Beard: My team and I were looking for a topic in the
history of art that people really want to argue about – that still
makes people cross, or puzzled, or take ver y different views.
An awful lot of art history comes down to admiration, whereas
the nude is a subject about which there are still controversies.
So it was fun to try to unpick those controversies and how we
might resolve them.
And some of your comments have indeed caused a bit of
a stir. You said, for instance, that “female nudes in western
art are soft porn for the elite dressed up in a classical guise”.
I didn’t quite say that! When these things get reported, they get
cruder and cruder the further they go down the food chain.
I can’t remember the exact words, but what I think I actually
said was that you’ve got to face the question of whether nudes
are soft porn for the elite. Committed gallery-goers tend to
be terribly sniffy when they hear someone say: “Oh, this is just
soft porn for the elite, isn’t it?” I can be sniffy about that, too,
but I still think it’s a question you have to ask.
I’m not sure whether there is an answer, but when you look
at some nudes in some art you do wonder what the difference
is between them and soft porn. It’s an issue that
comes over very clearly in one of the paintings
that we feature in the documentary – [French
artist] Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting
L’Origine du monde (‘Origin of the World ’ –
see page 79). It’s a very detailed, hyperrealistic
painting of a woman’s genitals. She doesn’t
have a head and she doesn’t have any limbs.
How do we explain why this is in a
gallery and is a masterpiece, whereas we
would be much more likely to find similar
photographs of the same subject matter
in a not-wholly-salubrious shop? When
it comes to the human body there isn’t a
straight divide. Whether something is porn
or art is partly in the eye of the beholder.
Were you surprised by how difficult it is for people
to navigate that boundary?
I’ve certainly been very surprised at the vehemence of the
reaction I’ve had to this series, even down to the rather crude,
semi-accurate quoting of what I said. It’s remarkable how really
violent people get when they’re confronted with the difficulty
of this distinction. Looking at some of the Twitter responses,
you think: “Blimey, we do need a programme investigating
these issues”. People aren’t just sounding off – they’re being
threatening. I’ve had people write: “I think she needs to be
punched every day” – for saying that there might be a problem
with the difference between art and porn! You think: “Wow,
why is this so difficult?” In a way, I think that these kinds of
reactions justify the programme.The programmes vividly illustrate that this has always been
a subject that’s got people animated and angry. You open
with Pra xiteles’ fourth-centur y BC statue of Aphrodite
[pictured right] for instance. What reaction did that cause?
Praxiteles’ statue is what we believe to be the first full-size
sculpture of a female nude in Greece, and probably the entire
west. It’s a ver y puzzling piece: we have no idea why, after
centuries of sculptors representing women clothed, Praxiteles
chose to sculpt the goddess Aphrodite in the
nude. What we do know is that it was instantly
quite difficult for people. The first clients he
offered it to said no, thank you, and it ended
up being taken by the city of Knidos in what
is now Turkey. They got lucky in a way, because
it became a huge, slightly notorious tourist
attraction – they put it on the ancient
equivalent of fridge magnets.
But there are lots of stories about it
that show very clearly how difficult it
was for people. There’s one famous story,
described centuries later, about a young
man who fell in love with the statue
and managed to get locked up with her
in the temple. And then he tried to... well,“Christianity, at some level,
undermined the sense that
the naked male body was
a symbol of citizenly goodness”
GETTY^ IMAGESMichelangelo’s 16th-century
sculpture David became “the
fridge-magnet version of the
male nude”, Beard suggests