| The
name "Ava Adore" is from The Smashing Pumpkins' excellent
Adore album. It was a terrific record, one of the band's
best, but the songs were more low-key than the typical alterna-rock
anthems people expected, so it wasn't very successful. People often
prefer repetition and stability, rejecting anything or anyone different.
Anyway,
this is another good piece from my model series. Here's something
I've noticed, and maybe you have, too: a lot of people get uncomfortable
with these portraits. Nudes are perfectly fine, pretty much expected
in the art world. But put some clothes on your models, and suddenly
everyone's upset. So they're sexual, so what? Go to a museum sometime.
There's more naked women than at the Playboy Mansion. But we don't
mind, because - what? - the women in those paintings are "too
heavy" by our standards? Really, what's the difference here?
That's
a question that was always in the back of my head, especially in
this wonderfully quirky Puritanical country we live in. How do you
react to the sight of the human body? What is considered acceptable
in the eyes of the art world? Why exactly are we, as artists, still
applying the classical standard of beauty in our work, as opposed
to the world we live in now? Are we unable to look at someone without
all the cultural sexual politics getting in the way?
Alright,
that's more than one question. But I was trying to get at those
reactions, get to the heart of the matter. Discuss. |
