To anyone who says art museums are boring, we feel it's important to point out that gallery walls are pretty much teeming with naked people.
If you don't find yourself riveted by bowls of fruit or portraits of generously jawed Hapsburg royals wearing ruffs and doublets, you can always feast your eyes on plenty of subjects wearing nothing—all those unclothed gods and goddesses, nymphs and courtesans, Adams and Eves served up to the (mostly) male gaze over the centuries.
To make the search for representations of the human form even easier, adult video streaming site Pornhub (we're sure this is the first you're hearing of it) has introduced Classic Nudes, a collection of free self-guided digital tours for six of the world's most famous museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery in London, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
The purpose of each tour, according to the website, is to guide you "past all the prude paintings" and get "directly to the good stuff."
To that end, maps of each institution are provided online so that in-person visitors with smartphones or tablets can easily follow an illustrated route to around 20 selected nudes throughout the galleries of each museum.
The site includes reproductions of the featured works as well as textual descriptions that are playfully lewd yet, as The Art Newspaper points out, educational as well.
"While [Edgar Degas] may be best known for his depictions of ballerinas," reads the description for the French Impressionist's 1856 Male Nude at the Met, "in this work ... he painted an entirely different type of tiny dancer."
Yes, that's referring to the part of the model you think it's referring to.
Certain works also have audio commentary recorded by adult performer and director Asa Akira, who pulls off the possibly unprecedented feat of making a museum audio tour at once steamy and funny.
(The Brunette Odalisque [c. 1745] by François Boucher / public domain)
All the content from the tours is available for free online, so you don't have to be at any of the museums to bone up (sorry) on the history of Western art at home.
And home is the only safe place to view the handful of videos created for the site by the amateur porn duo known as MySweetApple. Their graphic, sleekly made short clips reinterpreting works such as The Brunette Odalisque by François Boucher, Titian's Venus of Urbino, and the aforementioned Male Nude by Degas should not, we repeat not, be viewed while you're in public. Those are strictly NSFM—not safe for museums.
