Many museum visitors suspect that on certain nights the pictures rise from the canvases to talk to each other, to celebrate, to dance.
August Macke's lady in a blue coat sits down on a black square, Marinetti's futuristic racing cyclist chases the Nike of Samothrace.
People are not allowed to attend the celebrations, but experienced art critics immediately see that things are not always good there - when, on the morning after, Gustave Moreau's Galatea, for example, smiles a little more blissfully than she does on ordinary days.
No surveillance camera has ever filmed this.
And that is exactly what the company Pornhub wants to change now, the Internet portal, whose business model is trading in images that show what is actually happening in secret: Pornhub sells sex, and because this trade does not have the best image, the company is involved also against breast cancer and has beaches cleaned of plastic waste.
Nevertheless, Pornhub cannot get rid of the bad reputation.
As recently as June 34 women filed a lawsuit;
in most cases, the point is that their husbands filmed them without their knowledge and made the videos available to the platform against their will.
Complete chastity
Nothing has been decided yet - but if the women are right, the company's image will not be saved by the fact that it has recently wanted to fire up the artistic sense. The latest project is called “Classic Nudes”. It is an online guide to the most important and perhaps also the most beautiful nudes in art history, with comments that refer to the history of their origins with appropriate brevity.
And when it comes to the erotic rather than the art-historical impact of these pictures, there is nothing to be said against it. Anyone who believes that this art can only be approached in a state of complete chastity has not understood either the intentions of the client or those of the works. On the contrary, that is precisely where the aesthetic challenge comes from looking at these pictures: that one has to succumb to their charms and at the same time resist them; that they demand desire and at the same time sublimate it.
However, the company's art project boils down to more direct forms of reception. And so there are now the first little films that pretend they know what happens when Courbet's “Origin of the World” or Goya's “Naked Maya” start to move. A man comes into the picture and then what has to be done in porn is done. The tension is out, the challenge is over. You feel like flirting with Jackson Pollock's splashes of paint and hugging a beautiful red from Rothko on one of those nights when the pictures wake up.