Lily Cole is Nude in Playboy, but is it Art?

Robin Simon, editor of the British Art Journal, says yes:

The fact is that if nude images are not arousing, whatever the prudishness surrounding them, then they are not very good works of art. Goya, remember, painted two versions of his Maya: one clothed, one unclothed. They were fitted upon a revolving system so that her male lover could see her naked – nude – and his official visitors with her clothes on. Both paintings are great works of art. And these snaps of Lily Cole look pretty good to me.

James Fox, a co-curator at the British Museum, says no:

Art, of course, can be anything, but not anything can be art...Cole's criteria are lying in shreds next to the clothes she discarded on the studio floor. If her performance is art, then what, for heaven's sake, is it doing in Playboy? Indeed, to argue that pornography is art is as nonsensical as arguing that apples, when not quite spherical, are actually pears. They are two qualitatively different products.

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