nudish prudish -- psychological nudity

The latest version of the ‘nude show’ is up now, a popular annual event for a local non-profit. So in the paper the executive director said, ‘We’re so used to seeing naked bodies on the wall, we don’t see them anymore.’ That’s why this exhibit which ‘dates back to our founding,’ has ‘evolved’ through the years. Well just for the historical record, I was on the gallery committee which first proposed a nude show, and would like to say something straight up about ‘naked bodies,’ so ordinary, so mundane, so boring these days.

At that time, the hometown was getting used to selling liquor on sunday, just thawing out from the pretense of horsey aristocracy, gentile and prudish. Overall, community standards were repressive and lip-service dishonest, so the sheer notion of nudity seemed titillating to some, a sort of annual sanctified scandal, and, as a fact, it’s popularity was a harbinger of the cultural openness we applaud these days, but that was just a side-effect. It mainly became popular because it offered a platform for painting, a chance to see and judge the work of local and regional artists. Sadly, over the years the exhibit became more and more progressive, and finally degenerated into dissociated parts and deviant suggestion, so conceptual, no one went. 

It’s been revived but they feel the need of a hook, some theme to make it more interesting, ‘More than naked bodies on the wall.’ Maybe you guys should look at the paintings as they are, and hold the hot sauce, the fancy hats, the bells and whistles. There are reasons the human body is the most painted object of all time, and possibly the subject most evocative of values and revealing of character. We all grew up in families, we’re all human and have mirrors in the bathroom, it’s a subject we know well. If the painter produces icy crags and snow-laden pine, you’ll have to take his word for it, but we all know bodies, and if you’ve followed art at all you’ve seen them depicted many different ways. Essentially the human body hasn’t changed for a couple of hundred thousand, but the way it’s portrayed varies with the age, with the culture, from artist to artist, and what does that tell you? The painting of a nude reveals nothing new about the human body, that’s for sure, but lots about the age, the culture, and the artist who made it.