Our Unpaid Correspondents: I See London, I See France...

From time to time, readers give me tips on stories I might find interesting. Reader H from Dallas, Texas is the source of today's news of the strange and ridiculous. Apparently (and this has been independently authenticated through news sources), a 5th grade art teacher from Frisco, Texas took 89 of her students to the Dallas Museum of Art to get some of, you know, the culture. One of the kids went home talking about having seen naked people, the parent complained, and the teacher got fired.

Now, this is obviously the worst kind of religio-reactionary bullshit. And further proof that we live in a theocracy. And, somehow, more evidence that we're going to bomb Iran. But the nature of this bit of stupidity is worth teasing out.

First of all, let us consider the Renaissance. This was an era so completely dominated by the Catholic Church that it makes our own little theocracy here look like a bacchic idyll. And yet, the hallmark of public sculpture in the Renaissance -- PUBLIC sculpture, like in town squares, not hidden away in museums, was the male nude. There is, of course, Michelangelo's David, which graced the Piazza della Signoria (main square to you and me) in Florence. And it's not like anyone saw that as excessive and tried to correct the error -- right next to him is Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus, which has TWO nude men. Add to that Cellini's Perseus, which is a sculpture of a nude man slaughtering a nude female and holding aloft her decapitated head as he stands literally on top of her dead (nude) body. You've also got, in the same space, Giambologna's Rape of the Sabines, in which a nude man carries off a protesting nude woman while trampling her nude countryman. And there are more, those are just the major ones. All of these works, with the exception of Michelangelo's, were made during the era when the Catholic Church was confronting the Reformist menace from the north; they had every reason to crack down, but it doesn't appear that anyone in this generally reactionary and conservative culture found anything odd, or threatening, about walking past sculptures of naked people every single dingle damn day.

Of course, the important distinction is between naked and nude. None of the figures in the above sculptures is unclothed. They're nude. To be unclothed is to be naked -- to be viewed as a personal body, personally exposed. The nude is fully dressed, however; he or she is clothed in artistic convention. This distinction is most famously made by John Berger in his fabulous Ways of Seeing, but others say it, too, because it's so obviously right. Whether the nude is the object of sensual desire depends on gender and context, but in any case the nude is never viewed in the same way as real bodies. Manet's Olympia, for instance, isn't nude; she's naked, precisely because she has none of the happy conventions that turn the body as we physically experience it into a simulacrum that we visually devour. It might be quite proper to be offended if your kid had actually seen naked people -- maybe -- on the grounds that that provides too much explicit information about sex; but it's ridiculous to be offended by the nude, precisely because the nude has been stripped of all of the offensive bits.

The proof of the pudding is that no one can figure out what work this kid saw that was so "offensive". Looking around the museum, at the sea of nudes, no one can see ANYONE in any of the pictures who looks the least bit naked. They're all nudes, and in that sense teach you absolutely nothing about what naked people look like. Thank god for that, by the way, because most people you really wouldn't want to see naked.

From stories like this, you'd get the impression that religious people have never glanced under their own clothes and found out that they're naked under there. What a shock! But that's not really the point; what they should have done was looked under their clothes and found out that they're not nude under there.