Tracey Emin Selected To Create Erotic Art For Playboy

Tracey Emin and Cindy Sherman both Royal Academicians are among seven artists chosen to create an original work of art for Playboy Magazine.

Playboy hasn’t strayed much from it’s tried and tested format of flesh and literature since its founding in 1953 by Hugh Heffner. Marilyn Monroe appeared on the first cover, long before she became a Warhol icon and Jayne Mansfield popped out of her top to show an adolescent readership, what lurked inside her unmentionables.

Now Playboy’s latest distraction from soft porn and into legitimacy spotlights, ‘The Playmate as Fine Art’. This is a feature that will appear in the January/February 2013 issues, of the adult Magazine. Cindy Sherman, Tracy Emin, Richard Prince, Will Cotton, Ryan McGuinness, Jill Magid, and Wes Lang also contribute to explore a mix of the expected provocative material highlighting the subject of consent into the context of the so-called “pornographic” genre of publication. The magazine hopes to identify the female body as a work of art, in its images, raising questions of the ethics of human behaviour and the hidden sexual politics of contemporary society. In other words this is a great excuse to watch others, get their kit off!

Cindy Sherman is no stranger to investigating her own sexuality through the exploration of top shelf magazines. Her 1981 series “Centrefold” depicts clothed self portraits with looks of distress or defeat mimicking erotica. The US photographer and film director has contributed two 1992 explicit photographs to the Playboy project.

The painter and photographer Richard Prince has offered a pop inspired photograph, Untitled Girlfriend 2012. “It’s different to generate my own photographs. I don’t do it often, but when I do I try to think that what I’m taking already exists,” he said.

Surrealist sweetie, landscape painter, Will Cotton (illustrated) who takes inspiration from the board game ‘Candyland’  and the Pop artist Mel Ramos, has contributed ‘Cotton Candy Queen ‘, a rather traditional Playboy centrefold. “The model for this painting is Miss Ruby Valentine, a burlesque dancer from New York. She’s oozes her sexuality on a cotton candy cloud, wearing a crown of boiled sweets.

Tracey Emin has submitted Lonely Chair Drawing V. The work recalls an incident  from her teen years. YBA Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale and was made a member of the Royal Academy. She currently teaches drawing at the Royal Academy of Art.

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