The offending artworks include the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000-year-old limestone figurine of a woman. Facebook removed a photo of it from the Vienna Museum of Natural History’s page several years ago for being “pornographic.” ....
Though nudity is generally not allowed on Instagram and Facebook, the platforms make some exceptions. For example, Instagram’s community guidelines say: “Photos in the context of breastfeeding, birth giving and after-birth moments, health-related situations (for example, post-mastectomy, breast cancer awareness or gender confirmation surgery) or an act of protest are allowed. Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK, too.” Facebook’s rules allow for nudity in photographs of “paintings, sculptures and other art”...
Despite the flexibility of the platforms’ guidelines, museums and other institutions that post photos of art have found that instances of nudity have not always been deemed acceptable. Part of the reason could be that on social media, censorship is less a matter of public opinion than the sensitivity of artificial intelligence, which is used to flag content that violates a site’s guidelines....
This is good publicity for Vienna, whether it actually can get photos of the Venus of Willendorf on Facebook and Instagram or not. They're not only reaching Only Fans people. They've got an article in the NYT. And now you're going to remember that the Venus of Willendorf is in Vienna. What an upbeat symbol for the city!
So old and so new! A much better brand than the waltz.
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You can find Venus in Sexual Personae I think. I didn't know it was pornographic. All I remember is tits. 25,000 BC was before they went pink probably.
It’s a creative solution to a stupid problem caused by the Tech Overlords of Censorship. Maybe they can switch to Truth Social in ‘22 so they aren’t lost among the porn accounts on OnlyFans.
How is it remotely possible that a woman with no access to processed food, sugar products, saturated fats, Twinkies, and EBT cards could possibly get that fat??
- Krumhorn
The figurine is the poster child of the body positivity movement. Jack Sprat's wife?
They are recognizing the bitch phase of big platform censorship is over and moving into the the go somewhere else phase. Hopefully the trend continues...
This is a good move, considering that OnlyFans already caters to art aficionados.
"A much better brand than the waltz."
And a much, much better brand than Freud. As a symbol of humanity before hang-ups.
But forget the waltz. What about Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Mahler?
They removed the Venus of Willendorf over concerns about statuary rape.
Now they would ban it because of her hair...
Why does this make me think of a Jimmy Buffett album? I'll be back with the answer later.
The social media platforms are following former US Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter’s dictum “I know it (pornography) when I see it”. In their bizarro world of what is acceptable and what isn’t, Facebook’s rules “allow for nudity in photographs of paintings, sculptures and other art” but they block this 25,000 year old sculpture? Archaeologists consider this a “work of art” that was discovered at an archaeological dig in 1908 in Willendorf, Austria. Hell, it survived the Nazis running Austria for 7 years (1938-1945) and they had their own definitions of “decadent art” that was pretty drastic (although the top Nazis like Hermann Goering collected, usually by taking, many “decadent” works of art instead of destroying them - hypocrites just like their modern day counterparts running social media sites, but I digress). I consider the people who run the social media platforms to be on par with the Nazis, Maoists, Marxists, and other dictatorial governments and organizations for arbitrarily deciding what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable - they are all despicable when censoring freedom of speech and thought.
I, for one, suggest that the nudity of the statue is irrelevent. This is the result of having some idiot at the website who has the authority to ban tits, or an AI equally well programmed to do stupid things. The Rodin memorial statue of Balzac, used Rodin's second version of Balzac's body, depicting the author masturbating beneath his robes. I suggest this maybe, might, perhaps, be a fully covered body whose depiction is more scandalously obscene than the Venus described here. Yet it is not banned from anywhere!
Michelina Femina.
For as long as people have been able to make sculpture, paintings, and drawings, we have exaggerated the depiction to produce an ideal. All the Venus of Willendorf does is go for amplitude as the ideal. If it looks bizarre from our distance in time, distance yourself from our time and look at our depictions as if you were from somewhere far away. Look at the comic books and cartoon characters. They are no less exaggerated than the Venus.
"What about Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Mahler?"
Yes, I considered traveling to Vienna once. I asked myself why, then realized I could just play my records.
Why be Venus wearing a pussy hat?
Venus of Willendorf? Hubba-hubba!
Every composer on that list wrote waltzes, with the possible exception of Mahler. Good ones, too.
I first saw Vienna when I was a kid, at the head of my proud cavalry.
In 1978 my wife and I visited Vienna at about the midpoint of our big Eurail circuit.
Lovely and historic place. The Kunsthistorisches and Army Museums were great--the latter had the battered little car that carried dying Old Europe off the scene.
Some of the buildings still bore the scars of the bombings and street fighting in WW II, and just across the river is the Marschfeld, where two great battles were fought in 1809.
It's on our list for a revisit if the world still spins in a few years, and I'll definitely go to some concerts.
Bizarre that the platforms will not make exceptions for art museums.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." -- John Gilmore
Bret Weinstein pointed out on his podcast that YouTube has now become Sesame Street, as it no longer caters to adults. It caters to children. Their censorship policies reflect that reality. So it's interesting to see "adult art" making its way to ... an adult social media site.
Next up: Trump's speeches will be posted to PornHub.
Could they maybe have a joint page with the sex museum on the Prater? Asking for a friend.
When I was a grad student studying computer science on the GI Bill in the 1970s one of the hottest topics in AI was called “common sense reasoning.” If the Venus of Willendorf is treated as obscene then they haven’t had much success with that area of research in the past half century.
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