Yes, But Is Tit Art?

Australian artist Di Peel paints with her breasts. 

The mother of two, Di works at the kitchen table rather than at a canvas. "I either apply the paint to my breasts and lean on to the canvas or apply the paint to the canvas and then lean into it to spread the paint."

Back when I was in college, this activity used to be known as "Friday night with nothing to do."

Ms. Peel's technique is getting a lot of attention because TV news loves it when women will go on the air to talk about their tits under the guise of news.  Nothing she's doing, however, is particularly new. 

French conceptual artist Yves Klein spent most of the 1950s and '60s smearing models with paint and rolling them on canvases in the name of art.  He called those models "living brushes" because it sounded better than calling them "hot babes painted blue."  His work ended up looking like this.

If you go here and watch the flash presentation, you'll see the very serious Klein smearing a beautiful woman with paint using his bare hands. It was necessary for him to use his bare hands so that he could more precisely control the application of paint, not just because he liked smearing warm, viscous fluids onto beautiful naked women.  And if you go here you will see him doing it to two beautiful naked women at the same time, while accompanied by a small orchestra, apparently to set just the right mood.

According to this art historian, Klein's artistic goal was to create "an ecstatic and immediately communicable emotion."  Is getting a boner an emotion?

Inspired, perhaps, by Klein's work, M. Briquette uses her own naked female body as a "living brush."  Ms.Briquette, an artist apparently more serious about her breasts than is Ms. Peel, lives in Playa del Rey, California, which I can attest is a great town for breasts.  Ms. Briquette, unlike most residents of Playa del Rey, uses her breasts to create art. 

Breasts are, of course, excellent for a number of purposes, both serious and frivolous.  They are not, however, the perfect mechanism for painting, and Briquette's work tends toward the monotonously symetrical: Smeary circle here, smeary circle there, and that's about as far as it goes. Still, she does justify her work without sounding like a complete idiot, which is more than most artists can manage:

In some ways you might even call it performance art because of the whole process I go through of painting my body to make each painting. I like the organic forms that occur when I press my body against the canvas, and I feel that I can manipulate the paint to better articulate different moods by using my hands and fingers.

I was once sitting at a table in a bar when a young woman came up to the bar window, lifted her shirt and pressed her breasts against the window.  When she left, there were perfect imprints of her breasts on the dusty glass.  I didn't think of it as art at the time.  If only I had known.

Comments

[Lee]

Ugh. Repeat, ugh.

[Ava]

Clearly that's the only way she can get people to look at them.

[Duf]

Breast. Post. Ever.

Sorry.

[michelle]

In twat city did the titprint purportedly happen?

[Pursuit]

Duf kind of got the final word on this one.

Well done. Very well done.