Category Archives: Artists

“Everyone Has Nipples”

by ChristopherAgostino – Posted 2/5/2012

Janet and Justin  – Superbowl XXXVIII

On the day of the Superbowl it seems appropriate to write about nipples. I’ve been reading a bit on the habit Facebook has of censoring body painting images, and the surmise that Facebook measures the level of offense based on the relative visibility of a female model’s nipples in the final image. One blog referred to it as “Facebook’s war against nipples”. Well, I have a relevant quote, too: “Everyone has nipples.”

One of the first discussions I had about all this was with a European body painter back in 2006 on the conflicted duality of the American cultural fascination with female breasts (in Playboy, advertising, Superbowls, etc.) versus the fear of the exposed female nipple. The subject came up because of the restrictions imposed about just how much of the model we could paint at the convention we were teaching at. The quote above is from Carolyn Roper, another European body painter, at a different convention in 2008. That convention had one of the strictest modesty requirements. Not even pasties or nipple covers were enough, the female models had to wear tube tops or bras to get painted for the classes and competitions. I’ve written before how poorly I think it works to paint over someone’s underwear, and at this convention I found it very awkward—and I’m an American, how much more so for the Europeans teaching there, like Carolyn. So she arranged to have a male model for her demonstration class to avoid the problem, and as she painted the salient portion of his chest she remarked about how everyone has nipples and so she didn’t see what all the fuss was about painting a woman’s as opposed to a man’s.

You really can’t got much more naked than this, can you?

If Ingres’s Venus, fully naked, hangs as a treasured masterpiece in a museum, if it is acceptable for an artist to paint nipples on a canvas portrait of a naked model, why should I have to hide a model’s nipples in a body painting? We already had Demi Moore‘s nipples on the cover of Vanity Fair on newsstands twenty years ago (see http://wp.me/p1sRkg-6v), so why all the fuss still today?

There was a funny sequence in the U.S. Supreme Court just recently as they adjudicated the case regarding decency standards on prime time TV when the question turned towards the offensive nature of a bare buttocks being seen (from the side) in an episode of NYPD Blue some years ago and the lawyer arguing against that interpretation pointed out that the US Supreme Court building was full of classic art images that included bare butts, many bare butts. Looking back at the most famous “nipple slip”, Janet Jackson’s at the Superbowl, which is also a topic of the larger case the Supreme Court is considering, it’s hard to decide which part of that half time show all about sex was the most offensive. I’m pretty prudish, or, rather, I have real trouble with what I perceive as sexism and the objectification of women, so the part that troubled me most was when the dancers dressed as cheerleaders chose to “take off all their clothes” because “it’s getting hot in here.” Janet’s breast was anticlimactic after that. You can review the show and form your own opinion:  http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x45h8i_super-bowl-xxxviii-halftime-show-fu_music

I believe that we each should have the freedom to control how we use or decorate our own bodies. And in regard to the freedom to display our bodies, I go along the lines of the way it’s handled on New York State beaches: “nude but not lewd”. In New York State a women can go topless any where that a man can, otherwise it is considered sexual discrimination. Just to know that this is the law is a good thing. It’s not overly taken advantage of. There is topless sunbathing sometimes on some NY beaches, even fully naked men and women on some, but that tends to be in generally understood areas of certain beaches (“nude but not lewd” is said to be the New York State Parks guideline on that.) I have thought that the more that American women are given the opportunity to be topless (at the beach, for example) the less power there will be in the cultural insistence on women’s breasts as indecent sex objects (and it is that  implication of indecency that bothers me, not the sexuality.), but I am less certain of that than I was.  Occasionally you’ll see a topless woman on a NY city street, usually for a political cause, like the topless women holding signs at the start of Occupy Wall Street that pundits used to ridicule the nascent movement and which John Stewart made fun of (he didn’t show them naked on TV, because even though he’s on a cable channel without any relevant FCC restrictions about that it’s just not done in the U.S. for fear of public outrage—but my local Comedy Central channel airs ads for a strip club just about every night during his show.)

Regarding the public acceptance of nudity in body painting, the best advocate for that acceptance is to expose the public to beautifully painted bodies, male and female in all shapes and sizes. Significantly, I think, there will be a step in the right direction at this year’s Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC http://www.fabaic.com/) in Fort Lauderdale as they have invited the general public to attend the body painting competition for the first time, on May 27 (2012). That’s gotta be a good thing and I am looking forward to being there—though I expect nipple covers will still be required for the female models, we are not in Austria yet.

Painting at the World Bodypainting Festival

The Horned Goddess, topless rock art from before 2000 BC, about as old as a painting can get….

Yet when I painted her onto a model’s face for my book, I felt compelled to remove the breasts so as not to offend anyone. Silly, right?

As I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that all I got out of that class with World-Champion body painter Carolyn Roper in 2008 was a better understanding of nipples, from my notes on that class here is one great insight into painting technique and a pro hint about caring for your model:

1- All water based makeup colors sink in to the color beneath, so every color you paint on top of another will pick up a tint from the underlying color. It is especially true of white going on top of colors. So plan for this in how you lay down your background colors, and leave extra time to go over white highlights again at the end of the painting.

2- Keep the model’s butt, hands and mouth clear until the last stages of the painting, so they can sit, eat, drink and hold things as needed during the long hours you are working together.

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Enjoy the Superbowl! GO GIANTS!

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What really bothers me about this…

by Christopher Agostino

The two things that bother me the most about this Facebook censorship of the Breast Cancer Awareness images:

— 1—

That the removal of the images indicated no regard to the social impact of the project or the women participants. In this particular case it is the very act of allowing their unclothed, painted bodies to be seen publicly that is meant to facilitate the healing of the individuals and to be the vehicle for increasing breast cancer awareness. There seems to have been no consideration of that when judging whether the images met the vague Facebook standards—standards vague enough you’d hope they would allow leeway for a good cause.

— 2 —

That the actual nature of the images seemed to be of little or no consequence: in the particular case of Jamie, the survivor/model whose quote about having her photos removed by Facebook appears in my initial post, the image that was removed so completely obscured her torso through bodypainting and digital touchup that it’s hard to guess what the justification is. (see the post, her quote and the image: http://wp.me/p1sRkg-r0 )  Was the reason for removing the image only because there is body painting involved, as if that act is enough to make an image inappropriate? From a body painter’s perspective that possibility is troubling. More troubling is the suggestion in some postings about the image removal that it is specifically because these images have to do with breast cancer that they were flagged in the first place—that breast cancer images draw Facebook scrutiny. I don’t know if that is true. I do find it curious that the image of the cover of Survivors Magazine was removed from my Tweet about that initial posting, whereas the image of the cover of the Art Color Ballet book was not, even though it also shows a painted naked female torso.

So that’s what troubles me most.  

Now, the thing that is the most annoying about these kind of image removals is how coldly they are done—no explanation, and no vehicle for appeal. (If you don’t believe me, see the info below about Scott Fray’s attempts to deal with this problem, who has gone much further into it than I have) I’ve had a few bodypainting images in tweets just disappear, no notice to me at all. You Tube was nice enough to send me a message telling me they were restricting one of my videos, but no specific explanation why and no recourse offered to ask about or argue the decision. The best guess I’ve heard from anyone is that some viewer flags the content, then the powers that be take a look at it and the default setting is that they remove it, deux ex machina. These social media sites all have their Terms of Use we all have to agree to, and in there is language about their right to remove inappropriate content, but exactly how that is defined and how they apply their standards in a particular case is not something the user is privy to—Google, Facebook, all of them, are much more concerned about protecting their corporate privacy than they are about protecting our privacy.

I’ve pretty well run my course on this censorship issue and if I keep talking about it I run the risk of passing myself off as an expert in a field in which I’m only an occasional victim, and a minor one at that, as nothing yet of mine that has been removed was particularly troubling to me. I have one more post in me about this which should be coming up pretty soon: “Nipples”.

One more thing, I had a bunch of people contact me by email about the last few posts and their own issues with FB and censorship. I invite any and all of you who read my posts to add your comments here on the blog page and help move the conversation forward.

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On The Media just broadcast     The Facebook Show      Check it out to get an inside look at this privately controlled entity that has such a public impact and now has almost 1 billion users after only 6 years of existence. My favorite factoid might be about the guy who got FB to give him a copy of all the information they keep on him and it totaled up to 1,200 pages of data.

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A few months ago I was led to the art of Scott Fray. I don’t know Scott, and he was not one of the artists that contacted me about the recent censorship posts. His work is beautiful, breathtaking, championship winning, and apparently not appropriate for Facebook. See an article about his own problems with FB:  http://www.yesweekly.com/triad/article-12740-ufffdwe-are-the-champions-of-the-worldufffd.html

From the article, regarding what happens when Facebook bans your work: “Unfortunately, their Terms of Use are rather ambiguous, at least their policy toward bodypainted images. There seems to be no differentiation between nudity and what many (but obviously not all) would consider art. Nor is there any clear explanation on their FAQ page. The form e-mail the four received stated: ‘You uploaded a photo that violates our Terms of Use, and this photo has been removed. Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence, or other violations of the Terms of Use. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for a users, including the many children who use the site. If you have any questions or concerns, you can [sic] visit our FAQ page at www.facebook.com/help/?topic=wphotos.’  The FAQ page offers nothing in the way of clarification, particularly on where bodypainting falls in that gray area between nudity and art. And, even more unfortunately, the corporate office in Palo Alto, Calif. is unavailable for comment. No fewer than 20 interview requests via phone calls and e-mails from this reporter went unanswered. Granted, Facebook does not seek out offensive comments or photos, rather it waits for someone to report them.

See my fine art bodypainting at  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

To learn more about our programs and performances:  http://www.agostinoarts.com

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Body Painting on TV in a Superbowl Ad, a Good Thing, Right?

by Christopher Agostino

There’s a godaddy.co TV ad coming for the Superbowl that features body painting, sort of. “Uses” it, really. In line with their Superbowl ads of the past it shows much of an apparently naked women being minimally painted, and invites the viewer to rush to their website to see just how the naked the model really is. Because, as we all know, the only reason to body paint a women is to get her naked. Oh well.

When I heard there was a Superbowl ad with body painting I thought that might be a real good thing, get some quality body art into the public eye on a big stage, (like that cool series of ads with the  painted clothes being washed off to sell plumbing equipment) but although this is disappointing I think that’s all it is, an opportunity missed rather than any kind of blight on the good name of body painting. The salacious nature of too much body painting is too available for any of us to be too sensitive when someone makes a mockery of the art to sell sex in a TV ad.

It says something about our bizarro cultural values that it is apparently profitable to spend hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars using body paint to tease an audience about the possibility of seeing a naked breast yet photographs of fully painted breast cancer survivors get banned on Facebook. That’s what I was looking into, researching that censorship issue regarding the Breast Cancer Awareness Body Painting Project photos and Facebook (see the previous post http://wp.me/p1sRkg-r0) when I ran across the godaddy ad. Maybe that’s why the ad didn’t annoy me as much as it might, because the juxtaposition of those two uses of body art is so absurd. The body painting community has a long way to go to fully elevate its status above accusations of pornography when such an obviously positive social act as painting breast cancer survivors to help them reclaim their self image is cast in that light, and when a Superbowl TV ad presenting the biggest media exposure that body art is going to get explicitly uses it as an invitation to see something pornographic.

The godaddy thing is not much of a surprise. American advertising has always used sex to sell product, and if in the minds of the public “body painting = sex” than ads like this are to be expected. If there is a battle to be fought I think it is on the other end, when positive, artistic examples of body art are censored. Ultimately, I think it is the public’s exposure to the quality and significance of the art that will elevate the status of body painting. This is why the censorship issue with Facebook seems more troubling to me than seeing the art misused by godaddy. It is so inappropriate for Facebook to ban the body painting photos of brave breast cancer survivors who made the choice to appear topless as art. These are women with their bodies transformed by circumstances of disease beyond their control, taking new control of their bodies by allowing their new bodies to be seen naked, protected by the art they are wearing, and that should be respected, not vilified. They should be celebrated. That’s the ad that should be on TV during the Superbowl.

 

Some bodypainting in commercial videos:

Carolyn Roper’s very fun work in an Irish National Lottery commercial:  http://wp.me/p1sRkg-gG

Air New Zealand “Nothing to Hide” video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH3OEi4mG8g and their “Bare Essentials” safety video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7-Mq9HAE62Y   Carmel McCormick is the bodypainter for the ads, find her work at: New Zealand Body Art.  (www.carmelsbodyart.co.nz/)

See my fine art bodypainting at  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

To learn more about our programs and performances:  http://www.agostinoarts.com

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