“The idea that art provokes sex goes right back to the very origin of the western female nude”
ACCOMPANIES THE BBC TWO DOCUMENTARY
MARY BEARD’S SHOCK OF THE NUDE
“Christianity, at some level, undermined the sense that the naked male body was a symbol of citizenly goodness”
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 very differentviews. 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 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,
