Austrian museums takes their art to OnlyFans
After being censored on their official social media accounts, an art gallery in Austria has started an OnlyFans account.
The Natural History Museum of Vienna has had the account set up by the city’s tourism board, where suggestive works from the Viennese institutions are now displayed to paying customers.
OnlyFans is an app where viewers can pay a subscription fee to access exclusive content, which is often of an erotic or sexual nature, that is not available anywhere else.
In July, the Albertina Museum’s TikTok account was suspended for displaying erotic artworks by Nobuyoshi Araki, before the Leopold Museum’s account was flagged for “potentially pornographic” content by Facebook’s algorithms.
The Head of Media Relations at the Vienna Tourist Board Helena Hartlauer explained that Vienna’s museums move to OnlyFans was helping to “start a conversation” about the problems associated with social media.
While museums have expressed their frustration with social media, individual artists have also voiced their concerns about online guidelines, as they often use social media sites as promotional tools.
“This kind of censorship does not exist in a digital vacuum,” Haynes wrote, describing the deletions as homophobic, racist, fatphobic and misogynistic.
The Viennese museums’ move to OnlyFans is not the first time galleries have tried to move to different platforms.
This past summer, Pornhub started a service called Classic Nudes, an app that allows users to find images of nudes in the world’s most renowned art institutions.
The Louvre in Paris and other European museums responded very poorly to this initiative, as they all tried to sue the service for their unauthorised recreations.
In contrast, Vienna’s tourism board said it was making no pretensions about the sexuality and nudity of artworks in its collection. “We also wanted to do this to show solidarity with artists who are censored,” Hartlauer said.
“If you can’t show your artwork on social media this can really be an obstacle to your communications efforts, and even to your career.”
Image credits: Getty Images / OnlyFans