A woman displaying her vagina at Paris' Musee d'Orsay exposes ironies

Performance artists are the Rodney Dangerfields of the art world. They tend to get no respect from the general public, or even from a large measure of art connoisseurs.That's probably because for the most part, their "art" consists of doing stupid shit in public that doesn't suggest anything in the way of talent.

Section of Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World

Some of that happened last week at Paris' Musee d'Orsay, when Deborah de Robertis decided to plant herself in front of the Gustave Courbet painting, The Origin of the World, and show off her vagina. It went on for a few minutes as apparently bemused museum guards eventually managed to usher de Robertis out of the gallery (see video below).

Described by some as de Robertis 'recreating' Coubert's work, it wasn't really that. The Origin of the World depicts the nude torso of a model, whose head is unseen, but assumed to be Joanna Hiffernan, reclining on a bed. De Robertis sat upright in front of the painting, wearing a short, gold sequined party girl dress hiked up just above her hips, while holding her labia majora apart so that museum goers could get a better view of the interior of her vagina.

From the video, it seems like a ridiculous episode made more so by the continual applause of pretentious art gallery patrons, as if Ms de Robertis was demonstrating some particular artistic achievement.

In what would have been a great Monty Python parody of the pomposity of untalented artists trying to hype the atrocious garbage they produce with preposterous gibberish, Ms De Robertis, apparently in all seriousness, told Luxemburger Wort:

“There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. In his realist painting, the painter shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.”

It's not that I'm against attractive women showing off their vaginas. In fact, I'm all for it under most circumstances, and I would have probably been as happy as the next guy at the grand exposure that day.  And in her favor, as well as for the obvious, de Robertis did manage to demonstrate a odd societal irony in that a realistic painting of a nude woman is considered art and something that should be admired in public, however when a real woman actually does that, she could get arrested.

But another irony, or maybe it's just a question, is that if by showing off her vagina in public, Ms De Robertis is being an artist, doesn't that also make every stripper an artist, and transform the saddos who spend all their time in strip clubs into art connoisseurs?


Une artiste expose son sexe sous «L'origine du... by quoi2news