Vienna's museums now have an OnlyFans account for their nudes

When your Instagram or TikTok gets flagged for nudity, there’s one site everyone runs to for backup: OnlyFans. The platform thrives on nudity and sex work, making it an ideal home for those scorned by other social media platforms.

Vienna’s tourism board went through this same thought process after some of the city’s museums ended up being censored on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Yes, the Austrian capital’s tourism board created an OnlyFans.

A couple of Austria’s major museums — the Albertina Museum and the Leopold Museum — found themselves on the wrong end of the moderation stick in recent months after posting museum content on social media that included nudity. The Albertina Museum’s TikTok account was suspended and later blocked for posting photos by Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki — a photo that showed “an obscured female breast,” according to The Guardian. The Leopold, meanwhile, had a short video featuring Koloman Moser’s painting “Liebespaar” taken down on both Instagram and Facebook.

More of a protest than marketing — When these museums first went to post art from their collections on TikTok and Instagram, the idea was obviously to promote the museums’ contents. Given that the OnlyFans is hidden behind a paywall, it doesn’t have quite the same reach — but Vienna wants its OnlyFans to be more of a statement than a marketing ploy, anyway.

“Vienna and its art institutions are among the casualties of this new wave of prudishness – with nude statues and famous artworks blacklisted under social media guidelines, and repeat offenders even finding their accounts temporarily suspended,” the tourism board says. “That’s why we decided to put the capital’s world-famous ‘explicit’ artworks on OnlyFans.”

The history of censorship goes back far, far longer than the existence of social media, of course. The internet has made this issue more public than ever, though, and the widespread “prudishness” the tourism board refers to shows no sign of slowing down. Even OnlyFans itself has found itself the victim of censorship.

Not only digital — Actually subscribing to the tourism board’s OnlyFans might feel a bit silly, given that Google Image search exists, but you’re not just getting digital access when you subscribe. Anyone who subscribes (for just $3 per month, a steal on OnlyFans) will also receive either a free Vienna City Card (free public transportation!) or a free ticket to any of the museums featured on OnlyFans (Leopold Museum, Kunsthistoriches Museum Vienna, Naturhisorisches Museum Vienna, and Albertina Museum).

And yes, the tourism board plans to keep the OnlyFans account active even after this current promotional cycle. If you can, though, we always recommend heading to an actual museum in person, because nothing beats seeing famous nudes in situ.