Can sex sell outside of the city?

The body was politic at the Spring/Break Art Show this September. Acting as alternative programming to the prestige Armory international art fair, Spring/Break showcases the off-beat and the underground, this year in the former offices of Ralph Lauren on Madison Avenue, New York. Under the banner of "The Naked Lunch" there was a healthy depiction of bare breasts, but there was also, in soft, dreamy acrylic, something unusual — large-scale, full frontal, male nudes.

Represented by Andrew Craven of Craven Contemporary in Kent, Conn., the work of Montreal-based painter Bruno Leydet is perhaps jarring  to some by nature of its distinctly queer, casual approach. These aren't academic male nudes, Michaelangelo-style studies of power, but real men as seen privately through a voyeur's gaze — the viewer's, Leydet's, and their own. "Watch me watch me." Based on selfies taken by his subjects, the nudity echoes a sense of loneliness, but also anticipation. The mirror reflects the gay man's desirous self-assessment of his body, alone at home before the arrival of a lover, or a stranger.

Leydet described his work to me as “definitely playful, it can be sexual, but it’s also showing someone who’s totally vulnerable. I’m trying to portray something that I find to be beautiful.”

Craven has shown clothed works by Leydet in Kent, but admitted bringing a show of the full nudes to the country might pose a challenge.

The New York City art world exists at the intersection of three spheres of influence: economic privilege (the ability to buy art), mainstream liberalism (public-facing claims of inclusion), and the borderless, global interests of the major tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook (now called Meta), and Google’s parent company Alphabet — whose surveillance-based market has largely supplanted the throne where once sat the global financial system. So the art scene of Litchfield County and its surrounding areas is an interesting parallel, a kind of heavier hourglass — the sand falls the same way, even at a slower rate.

A challenge rural communities may face in a changing economic climate is high competition rates from e-commerce and their own slowed engagement with online capitalism. Small businesses that exist here but profit from a global audience are a rarity. John Kanell uses the backdrop of country life for his online cooking channel Preppy Kitchen, which reaches millions of subscribers on YouTube (owned by Google). That Google ad revenue would garner a creator like him an approximate yearly mid-six-figure, not counting additional revenue from sponsored ad deals on Instagram (owned by Meta). Designer Bunny William’s brick-and-mortar retail store in Falls Village, Conn., is able to be backed by profit from her larger brand, which includes her partnership with Ballard Design, an omnichannel commerce division owned by the Fortune 500 company Qurate Retail.

Most local art-adjacent businesses — theater, cinemas, publishing — faced with a limited population of customers and our government’s disinterest in arts funding, have taken on a nonprofit model. They exist thanks to donations by a circle whose personal wealth largely reflects savings from a past financial market, not engagement with current tech.

In contrast, art galleries, whose profit is based on commissions from works sold, must succeed financially. They’re also one of the few sectors of rural business reaching for a broader online audience.

“Since COVID, the art world has gone largely digital,” said James Barron, whose eponymous gallery in Kent, Conn., operates under an appointment-only model as he shows and sells work online. Barron points to Instagram as not just advertising for his exhibitions, but a direct connection to buyers. When it comes to sexuality in art, Barron hasn't exactly shied away,  previously showing exhibitions by the legendary transgender rock singer Jayne County, which included paintings titled “Attack of The Sodomites” and “Moses And The Burning Penis Bush.”

“I would show anything in the gallery that I felt had artistic merit,” Barron said, adding, “but that material would not work well on Instagram, it would be censored. Instagram is a viable selling platform, and even more viable after COVID, so I’m careful to crop or just show details online.”

Barron is hardly the only one in the art world with online censorship on his mind. Despite creating pathways for community,  social media as a democracy is an illusion. This time last year, NPR reported that in Austria the Vienna Tourism Board had been censored online for a photo of the Venus of Willendorf. Facebook deemed the image of the Paleolithic female figurine carved from  limestone 30,000 years ago to be downright X-rated. The Board mockingly protested against Meta by instead posting classic art to OnlyFans — a less regulated platform where users upload adult images behind a paywall. VICE also reported on the story, noting The Albertine Museum in Austria had their account on TikTok (a video-hosting app The New York Times called “Google for Gen Z”) suspended for showing the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, a Japanese photographer of female nudes. For individual emerging artists, freedom of sexual expression can be a financial risk. This year in New York, as detailed in The Art Newspaper, Robert Andy Coombs, a disabled queer artist whose intimate photographs depict him nude in his wheelchair with other men, had his Instagram account deleted after his work was re-posted by the Lower East Side's 1969 Gallery to promote an exhibition he was in.

Bruno Leydet, who primarily finds his audience through Instagram, told me that censorship from the app's algorithm has influenced his style — creativity from restriction. After an early painting depicting a model with an erection was flagged, he's painted his men in a more semi-flaccid state. He said the fine line of tiptoeing around the guidelines turned out to be beneficial. "I think it’s more interesting and more exciting. It’s not full-on erotic, there’s ambiguity. It’s good to have a little mystery."

Despite their intersection with the avenues governed by tech, galleries are still physical, open spaces — not storage for online sales. Especially outside of metropolitan centers, they are pillars for cultivating and expanding their region's cultural identity by showcasing tangible, contemporary art to the small-town public. But the question stands, when economic privilege and liberalism intersect in rural areas… just how “liberal” is that public?

Next week, the major voices of the area’s art world on what they would and wouldn't show here.