Remove the Tunick, we’ve seen it all before

Scoundrels abound and here comes Spencer Tunick, asking us to take off our clothes again.

Spencer Tunick transformed the iconic Sydney Opera House into a nude installation in 2010.

Scoundrels abound and here comes Spencer Tunick, asking us to take off our clothes again. Typically, he photographs flash mobs, or more correctly mobs of flashers, buck naked in public. Cleverly, he calls these things installations and contrives to stage them in the vicinity of important cultural institutions, close to art. It is this suggestion of art, this penumbra of art, that persuades authorities all over the world to sanction what would be, absent Tunick’s camera, acts of mass civil disobedience.

Tunick’s latest ramp begins with a shoutout to all of locked-down humanity: kit off, on the couch, snap yourself and send it in. Once he’s checked everybody out, he intends to curate a digital gallery comprising 100 nudes apiece from every nation on Earth, or somesuch. It’s sure to be oversubscribed, and not only because uploading nude selfies is very fashionable these days. Ordinary people are bored stupid and they want to be close to art too.

But Tunick is not quite an artist, more a stunt artist with just the one trick. His vision has scarcely evolved in 25 years. Whatever point he is trying to make, he made it in the 20th century. Whatever questions he is asking have surely been answered by now. He is widely uncollected by the major public galleries. The better art and photography periodicals pay him no mind. He once sucked up to Charles Saatchi, a monster no-no for any serious artist, by laying on the strippers at the opening of Saatchi’s London gallery. And he doesn’t pay his models. If the mob is small enough, low hundreds rather than thousands, they might get a free print each and the queer thrill of pointing to a pixel on a big pink blancmange and saying: “That’s me … I think.”

I don’t like Spencer Tunick.