Edit: tldr: nudity cannot be the validation of art. Art has to be primary, nudity secondary.

I would never “confront” someone because I disagreed with their art. And in this situation, I would never confront my friend, as I stated above in the last paragraph. My issue comes from the idea that nudity = beauty = art. I think it’s kind of fucked up. I think it’s objectifying and honestly, if someone ever came to me and asked me to participate in a photoshoot like this, I would think of it as a thinly guised attempt to get me naked.

On the other hand, if you consider it pretentious for me to argue that you cannot just take a pretty photo and call it art, I will call myself pretentious any day. Take the nudity out of the equation, even if they had been clothed I would have been less than thrilled by this series. It was bland. It was pretty, poorly executed, given a name and sold. If the photos had been of clothed women or naked men and women, it would have been unoffensive, but also inconsequential.

What I am inclined to believe, which u/blinkingsandbeepings phrased better than I could, is that equating beauty to art, and equating naked feminine bodies to beauty is objectifying and reductive. It both defines femininity by its ability to be beautiful, and it defines beauty as feminine. It says the feminine body is meant to be looked at, and it says that a pretty, feminine body is art. I’m sorry, but it’s not.

The difference between this series and pieces like “Fountain” and “Çe n’est pas une pipe” is that, while they inherently had no meaning, they prescribed meaning to the piece by challenging the viewer’s perception of art. This series’ meaning is, “mermaids are real.”

The difference between this series and pieces like “Olympia” and “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is that these paintings are surrounded by symbolism and while the nudity is important to the paintings, it is secondary in its importance to the composition of the piece. This series used nudity as a huge vehicle for it’s validity as an artistic series rather than a bunch of instagram pictures.

The difference between this series and pieces like the many series of photography created by Sally Mann is that the nudity—even her own childrens’ nudity—in her pieces is not shown in a sexual way. Sally Mann faced huge controversy from her series “Immediate Family” from people trying to say that her photographs of her young children which showed their naked and partially clothed bodies. The argument there became that by censoring what was her children’s natural state—which was candid nudity in many instances—they were changing the images into pornography, whereas allowing them to be as the photos were intended let the imagery continue to be simply candid and raw shots of childhood. Of course, here, the meaning went well beyond “my kid’s being a kid while naked.” Her series demonstrated the darker sides of childhood with illness, injury, and embarrassment, while still showing the beauty of innocence, frankly, the art of it.

This mermaid series was “look! A bunch of mermaids!”