Creative Promotional Efforts on Social Media

Recently, the tourism board of Vienna decided to create an account on the only social platform that allows nudity:  OnlyFans. This is because the board is protesting various platforms and their ongoing censoring of art from galleries and museums that depict nudity.

Back in July, the new TikTok account for the Albertina Museum, which houses one of the largest print rooms in the world, was suspended and subsequently blocked because it was showing works by a Japanese photographer named Nobuyoshi Araki, who had photos of the female body.

This forced the museum to create a new account. A similar incident happened in 2019 when the social media platform Instagram stated that a painting by Peter Paul Rubens had violated the community standards of the platform, which prohibits any sort of depictions of nudity – even if those depictions are creative or artistic.

A  similar instance happened with the Natural History Museum in 2018, when it uploaded a photo on Facebook of the 25,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf figurine, which was deemed as pornographic by the platform and was removed. The Leopold Museum also faced a similar struggle when it tried to promote a collection of nude paintings by Egon Schiele.

Both social media platforms as well as advertising regulators in the UK, US, and Germany refused to show the paintings in their city tourism campaigns. Even a short video of a painting by Koloman Moser was rejected by social media platforms.

However, all of these works and many others are finally on full display and don’t have to suffer the consequences of digital censorship thanks to OnlyFans. They’re all available on Tourism Vienna’s profile, and are now being teased on other social media platforms.

According to a spokesperson for the tourist board of the city, Helena Hartlauer, the cultural institutions around the city had a very difficult time trying to promote the artworks, as many of them were considered too explicit for social media platforms.

Although according to Hartlauer, the city can still function without promoting those artworks, they’re still important to the city. The cultural institutions around Vienna find the social media censorship frustrating and unfair, which is why the city resorted to using OnlyFans as its main promotional platform.

Those who are among the first to subscribe to Vienna’s account on the platform will receive either  an admission ticket to see some of the artworks in person, or a Vienna City Card.

The entire campaign is meant to be  an effort to promote Vienna as a great travel destination for tourists, since the Austrian government finally relaxed some of the border restrictions for foreigners due to the pandemic.

The campaign also works to raise awareness of the standards that many artists have to follow, which censor their artworks if they want to promote it on social media platforms.

Although the OnlyFans profile might not be the perfect solution for this problematic relationship between censorship and art , it’s currently the only one available, and appears to be effective.

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