free the nipple

$170M Painted Nipples Too Hot for Bloomberg TV

Free the nipple!
Free the nipple! Photo: Amedeo Modigliani/Christie’s

Nipples! Poor nipples. Banned from TV and Instagram, boobs’ sexier counterparts have been banished to seedy porn sites and the password-protected folder on your iPhone. The one chance nipples have of sneaking into American media is through art, but now even that is being censored.

During a segment about the historic $170.4 million Christie’s sale of Nu Couché by Amedeo Modigliani, Bloomberg TV took the liberty of blurring out the depicted woman’s nipples and vagina, for fear of offending the zero percent of people who have never seen a naked woman before.

The Financial Times took a similar route this weekend, adding black bars atop the painting before publishing a photo of it:

Luckily Nu Couché will be going to live with its new owner in China, where censorship has never been known to be an issue.