Laurie and Debbie say:

British “public intellectual” (actually a professor of classics at Cambridge) Mary Beard is a frequent commenter on the BBC. This week, she launched a new TV series called “Shock of the Nude,” in which she will be examining nudes in art and history, and will be exploring the difference between art and pornography–something no one has ever fully succeeded in doing.

In preparation for the TV show, Beard approached British artist Catherine Goodman, and commissioned a nude portrait of herself. From what we can tell from Internet images, Goodman was a fine choice: a good artist who seems to understand what Beard was exploring. It’s just fun to imagine the two of them, listening to an audiobook biography of Charles Dickens while Beard posed and Goodman worked.

Obviously, we are always interested in examinations of nudity in art, and Beard’s show sounds fascinating: we’ll be watching for it to turn up on this side of the pond.

By deciding to take off her clothes rather than declaim about nudity from the sidelines, Beard demonstrated both a laudable intellectual honesty and a spirit of curiosity.

Explaining her decision to bare all, Prof Beard said she wanted to strike back against idealised body images.

“I didn’t want to be the elderly academic commentator who talks about an edgy subject entirely from the safety of her own leggings and mac,” she said.

Nudity is vulnerability, and we agree that Beard couldn’t examine nudity without acknowledging that. Nudity is also coded in a great many contexts as sexuality, which is aided by the extremely narrow range of nudes we are accustomed to seeing in art and elsewhere:

“I realise that some people are going to say why on earth did she do it? Shouldn’t 65- year-old women keep their clothes on? But that is also part of the point of the whole series. Whose bodies do we see? Whose are deemed ‘okay for art’? Don’t old people have bodies too?

“In trying to democratise the nude a bit, and in being a bit more inclusive of different body types – maybe we are striking a little blow against all those idealised, photo-shopped body images with which we are surrounded, and which we can never live up to.

Nudes and sexuality are in the forefront of Beard’s reasons for making this series, as noted in an article in The Guardian:

“If you’re look at the nude you can’t avoid that question of where is the line between art and porn?” Beard said her main aim for the series is to make viewers look at the nude portraits and sculptures with a fresh perspective.

By including her own nude portrait in the show, she is also trying to make herself look with a fresh perspective–and that bodes well for the quality of her series. Of course, since we have been advocates for extremely diverse nudity, and Laurie has taken and displayed over a hundred photographs which make Beard’s points very clear, it’s a great pleasure to see these concepts being examined on such a public stage.

Thanks to Steven Schwartz for the pointer. Follow Debbie on Twitter.