The Theft of a Magritte
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
[edit: insert missing 'been']
Also, contains a painting of a woman with bare breasts above-the-fold. People sometimes mark such submissions with the letters "NSFW".
I get your point. But this is yesteryear thinking, no?
And what is the risk of someone opening an article "The Theft of a Magritte" during - you know - actual work time? ;-)
Either that, or it's the lusty way she is regarding the conch shell. Hey, people are into stranger things!
The same goes for Michelangelo's David. Because there is a default assumption of heterosexuality (and gay men are not considered a threat by a protected group), David is not going to arouse suspicion, no matter who is viewing it. Female nudes are a different matter, not because nudity in art is judged differently by the subject's gender, but because the viewer is judged differently because of their gender.
For the NSFW issue (i.e. coworker glanced and reacted badly to what you were viewing), this is just a matter of realism, plus a high sensitivity to what might offend other people and women in particular.
But I also don't think it's entirely about the "different standards to which women are held", which I perceive you to mean female-as-subject. In some ways it's more about male-as-viewer:
As sibling comment points out, when a male views a nude female, it is frequently assumed to be lecherous, or at the very least have prurient motivations.
When a female views a nude male (or female), it is assumed to be incidental, art, or accident.
This is also a double-standard, but honestly it cuts both ways.
Even in the US, nude art is not per se sexual harassment. Most workplaces will ban (non-work-related) nude art as part of an effort to create a massive buffer space around potential liability (among other reasons that don’t rely on it necessarily being sexual harassment), in part because the US has an unusually pro-initiation-of-litigation legal system (for instance, having a very high bar beyond merely losing before the loser of litigation is ordered to pay the winners legal fees.)
(There’s a weird sort of positive feedback loop where, despite distance from the law, people subjected to sexual harassment trainings in which employers, etc., imply that everything within the wide buffer space around liability that they are trying to create is “harassment” drives, if not the law, the public understanding of harassment, leading to pressure to expand the effective workplace definition further to create a buffer space around not only actual liability but the things people are likely to understand as harassment.)
That being said, I'd hope we could collectively evolve away from general prudishness when it comes to nudity, especially in a context like paintings.
Are many workplaces really so strict or people so embarrassed about nudity that being caught reading an article with an image of tastefully painted nudity is an issue?
Yes. Many are. Labeling thing with "NSFW" is a polite step we can take to make it easier for those whose workplaces DO have that concern. I have previously worked in a high school and at a bank -- both would have had this concern; for the former it would have been a serious offense.
The fact that it would have been a serious concern is itself concerning in my eyes. The art of Magritte is something I would expect and hope would be showcased in school, not frowned upon.
Looking at ART would be a serious offence at a high school???? Are the history/art books you use at that school also censored?
I mean, sure, someone might react to it if they only saw the painting briefly flash on the screen, but surely any sort of misundersstanding could be explaineed in a grand total of 10 seconds of conversation.
Even at others, looking at art in a book about art, that happens to have naked ladies pictured, would be seen as completely different (and more obviously scholarly) than looking at naked ladies, whoever originally painted them, on the computer. Once it's on the computer, it's just Internet Porn.
What an awful, awful place to live that must be.
>>Once it's on the computer, it's just Internet Porn.
Is that like a written rule somewhere? Surely it could be explained to a person with like, 2 functional brain cells that an article about art will have a picture of said art included.
Welcome to the fundamentalist theocratic Christian hell that is (parts of) America.
> Is that like a written rule somewhere? Surely it could be explained to a person with like, 2 functional brain cells that an article about art will have a picture of said art included.
While I have personally been fortunate enough not to fall afoul of such people, I have absolutely heard from people who had to deal with librarians or other school administrator types who, whether or not they had 2 functional brain cells in other contexts, were absolutely inflexible in their treatment of students on computers.
Naturally, this would've been back in the '90s, so having computers at all was a fairly new thing, and computers with Internet access were (for a public school library) positively bleeding edge. But students doing anything on computers other than very obviously typing papers were, at best, Goofing Around With School Resources, and, if there was anything on the screen that might remotely resemble porn....frankly, that could have been enough in many places in my youth to get a student expelled, without the possibility of appeal. Today, such a reaction would be much less common, but I would not be at all shocked if there were places in the Bible Belt where it was still totally possible.
The subject in itself is interesting, and there could probably have been a story of around 50 lines to describe the case and its resolution.
But, here, the author is professionally trying to waste your time with hundreds of useless paragraph of blabla that might have been generated automatically by an AI.
For exemple who cares that the stolen art division of the Belgian police changed its name 3 times for obvious non original names? Or that the lead investigator has a wine yard and like to offer wine to his friends and colleagues...
Here are example of time wasted to make you stay longer on the article page or to fill empty space:
"When I arrived at his eighth-floor office, overlooking the sprawling Belgian capital, he poured himself a cup while staring down at Molenbeek, which has been called by its own mayor “a fertile ground for terrorism.”"
"Belgian police first established a Bureau of Art and Antiques in 1988. Thirteen years later, when Belgium reorganized its law enforcement agencies, the unit became part of the country’s federal police force and was renamed Section Art"
"he recalled the investigation from behind his tidy desk, next to a table piled high with old case files. He wore gray slacks, a short-sleeve button-up, and the scuffed black dress shoes favored by detectives and those who play them on TV. His face served as its own good-cop-bad-cop routine: friendly, disarming smile; penetrating blue eyes."
" When Archer and his partner delivered the recovered paintings to Lorca’s daughter in Brussels, Verhaegen surprised his FBI colleagues with a special gift. “He grows his own grapes and makes his own wine,” Archer said. “We enjoyed the bottle thoroughly.”
de gustibus non est disputandum and all, but magazine writing has been ever thus, from Thoreau to Hemingway, Mailer to Wolfe.