An Italian woman’s post
featuring the 30,000-year-old artifact was removed late last year; last month,
the museum that houses it called out the social network.
Benjamin Sutton
A Facebook-safe version of
the Venus of Willendorf (illustration by the author for Hyperallergic)
An image of the Venus of
Willendorf (ca 28,000–25,000 BCE), the iconic Stone Age sculpture of a female
figure, is apparently too provocative to appear on a personal Facebook page. In
late December 2017, an Italian woman named Laura Ghianda (who lists her
occupation as “graffiti writer”) posted a photo of the ancient limestone nude
on Facebook — only to have it removed for being deemed inappropriate, as the
Art Newspaper and the AFP reported. Her attempts to appeal the decision were
unsuccessful, though three images of the artwork she posted subsequently
remain.
The Naturhistorisches
Museum in Vienna, which houses the Venus of Willendorf, has brought the
incident to the attention of a wider public and criticized Facebook’s reaction
to the Paleolithic artifact. A January 9 post on the museum’s Facebook page,
calling attention to the censorship of Ghianda’s image, proclaims: “Let the
Venus be naked!”
“There has never been a
complaint by visitors concerning the nakedness of the figurine and we never
heard of anybody who could have been offended by the look at this artifact,”
the museum’s director general, Christian Koeberl, said in a statement sent to
Hyperallergic. “The perfection of the representation and harmonious style make
the 29,500-year-old figure of the ‘Venus of Willendorf’ one of the most
expressive works of art from the Paleolithic Age.”
Meanwhile, the
Naturhistorisches Museum’s own Facebook posts, which also feature the Venus of
Willendorf, have never run afoul of the site’s murky nudity policies. A
spokesperson for the museum noted: “Our postings have never been
deleted/censored by Facebook. During the last few days, for example, we
published a post about our Valentine’s Day special with the Venus of
Willendorf, animal sex, etc., and it stayed on Facebook.”
Though Facebook revised its
policies in 2015 to allow “art that depicts nude figures,” images of artworks
portraying nude figures are still taken down. Two years ago, for instance, the
social network censored an image of Edvard Eriksen’s famous “Little Mermaid”
statue in Copenhagen. Facebook is currently on trial in France for similar
censorship of a 2011 post featuring Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde”
(1866). Though that work features a fairly detailed depiction of a nude woman’s
crotch, the Venus of Willendorf is less literal and clearly stylizes the female
figure.
The small sculpture, which
measures just under four-and-a-half inches in height, was discovered near the
Austrian town of Willendorf during a 1908 excavation conducted by
Naturhistorisches Museum archaeologists. Analysis has shown that the limestone
figure was previously coated in red ochre. Researchers believe that it was
carved with flint tools more than 25,000 years ago, and consider it one of the
most recognizable depictions of a nude female figure in human history.
https://hyperallergic.com/429553/facebook-censors-venus-of-willendorf/
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