Pornhub is the adult entertainment website, and the biggest of its kind on the web.
The company that was acquired by Fabian Thylmann (Manwin) and later known as MindGeek, is known as the largest pornographic website the world has ever seen. Despite that, Pornhub also has other ventures. For example, it hosted events and campaigns to raise awareness of breast cancer. It also managed other philanthropic endeavors.
In other words, not everything Pornhub offers is raunchy or hardcore.
And one of the its attempts to expand its reach, was through its "Classic Nudes" museum.
The project involved getting art lovers to look for nudity outside of its website, and to appreciate the artistic side of nudity and sex.
Through the project, Pornhub encouraged its users and visitors to visit famous museums, like The Louvre in France, MET in New York City, Prado in Spain, the Uffizi Gallery in Italy, and The National Gallery in the UK.
Initially, Classic Nudes covered thirty famous works found from the many museums around the world.
Through its Classic Nudes campaign, Pornhub wanted its users and visitors to go beyond adult entertainment to see some of history's most celebrated forms of erotic art.
The virtual tour featured audio tours, articles and annotated maps.
Pornhub promoted the campaign, as some museums started opening up their doors to the public.
Pornhub did this using SFW introductory video featuring the Hungarian-Italian porn star Cicciolina, as well as Pornhub brand ambassador Asa Akira.
"There’s a treasure trove of erotic art around the world – depicting nudes, orgies, and more – that’s not available on Pornhub. These pre-internet art pieces are currently sitting in museums, which we are now finally able to start visiting again as COVID restrictions are starting to lift,” said Asa Akira.
“So as people start to head back to The Louvre or The MET, they can simply open Classic Nudes, and I’ll be their guide. Time to ditch those boring self-tour recordings and enjoy every single brushstroke of these erotic masterpieces with me."
In the world where nudity is readily accessible for anyone with an internet connection, lesser number of people enjoy nudity in arts.
To those who live in the modern days of internet and mobile, classical arts may seem boring.
But with Pornhub introducing Classic Nudes, the adult entertainer was trying to convey the message that nudity in arts can be traced back way before digital technology, do that there are museums that worth their visit.
While a large part of Pornhub's Classic Nudes was virtual tours of each museum and where to find the pieces of work, a number of Pornhub models also brought some of the arts to life.
Classic Nudes also had a category called Another Perspective, which drew on a number of international collections to showcase artworks from India, Japan, China, and the Americas depicting non-white bodies.
Another Perspective was meant to showcase masterpieces from a greater variety of cultures, viewpoints, and subjects than that what are commonly presented in Western art.
It's worth noting that all the pieces Pornhub selected had been contrasted and verified by a team of art historians to avoid having works that can be deemed offensive, or with problematic historical background.
Many of the works adhere to the social conventions of the time and do not present a wider perspective, Pornhub said.
This project from Pornhub however, didn't last long.
About a month after its launch, complaints started pouring in.
Uffizi announced that it was planning to sue Pornhub for copyright infringement, objectiing to Pornhub’s use of Titian’s famed Venus of Urbino in a pornographic reenactment with the amateur adult couple, My SweetApple. In an interview, a representative for the Uffizi said that the museum viewed Pornhub’s use of its paintings as "totally illegal" and that it had "been done without any permission."
The Louvre launched legal action for the use of the painting Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses sœurs by an unknown artist. The Prado Museum also complained, and declined Pornhub's use of Francisco de Goya’s La Maja Desnuda.
Because of this, Pornhub was forced to remove the virtual tours altogether.
The goal of Classic Nudes, according to Pornhub, was to help museums recover from the financial toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. With more than 100 million daily visitors, Pornhub has the capacity to stir the crowd. But the response it received from the museums Pornhub sourced its content from, didn't go as it expected.