If your love of Venus stops short of her Venus mound, or if the reclining women of Egon Schiele make you want to Schieled your eyes, then the new initiative from the Vienna tourism board isn’t for you. After a consortium of museums grew tired of being banned from more prudish social media platforms, the city unveiled Vienna Strips on OnlyFans, a new account dedicated to some extremely old nudes.
Via Vice, the seed of the idea was planted in July, when the city’s Albertina Museum was kicked off TikTok for posting photographs by Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki. As the official announcement points out, much of this artwork “fell foul of the censors over 100 years ago. And the battle against censorship still rages on: with the rise of social media, bans like these are back in headlines once again. Major social media channels like Instagram and Facebook have nudity and ‘lewd’ content firmly in their sights. Vienna and its art institutions are among the casualties of this new wave of prudishness.”
The Vienna Strips on OnlyFans account posts images ranging from ancient fertility sculptures to artwork by Schiele, Peter Paul Rubens, Richard Gerstl, Koloman Moser, Amedeo Modigliani, and more. Much of this so-called “erotic” art is defiantly unsexy, even disturbing, proving that these tech filters don’t understand context, but instead, like a horndog teenager, simply stop thinking at the sight of a nipple.
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The city of Vienna has shared a promotional video for the OnlyFans account. The tongue-in-cheek visuals linger over obscured views of nudity, as text asks if the viewer if they “want to see more of Egon Schiele’s ‘unique assets?’” or “want to know every feature of a Rubenesque woman?” Check out the clip below.
This plan almost didn’t work out. In August, OnlyFans announced its intention to ban sexually explicit content, only to walk it back a week later.
