That Miley Cyrus photograph: artsy or outrageous?

When a photograph of the child star - with a naked back and damp hair, draped in a satin sheet - appeared in Vanity Fair, it caused outrage

When a photograph of child star Miley Cyrus - with a naked back, damp hair, and draped in a satin sheet - appeared in Vanity Fair, it caused outrage.

Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photoshoot
In today's Guardian Germaine Greer deconstructs the image in question, taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz.

As Greer describes, sexing up little girls is nothing new: "In western art most of the women portrayed semi-clad or totally nude are children ... When Lucian Freud paints girl children nobody cares ... Botticelli paints the yet-to-be-enjoyed goddess of love emerging from the sea, people come from all over the world to gape at her. The Greeks and Romans liked their goddesses meaty; our preferred Venuses are children. Hardy perennials such as Diane de Poitiers held their sway as long as they did because their bodies never matured. Kate Moss has been able to earn millions only as long as she could continue to project the body image of a 13-year-old."

So why the moral uproar over a photograph which is essentially the same thing? Even if, as Greer purports, Leibovitz's dirty postcard aesthetic depicts Cyrus as post-coital, or even worse a child prostitute and Disney her pimp, isn't this just a depressingly conventional piece of iconography?

Elsewhere, Zoe Williams dismisses the moral outcry over Cyrus's decency as a storm in a teacup. She is concerned, yet unsurprised, by the betrayal of the child star.

Vanity Fair
"It's the insincerity of everyone concerned that really chokes me," she writes. "Not one person involved can seriously think Miley Cyrus had any kind of influence over this, or any other, image-building decision."

Is the photographer to blame? Do you agree, as Stuart Jeffries suggests, that Leibovitz has "become something of a hack, an obliging furnisher of kitsch"? Or is Cyrus correct to maintain that her portrait is "artsy"?

Photograph of Miley Cyrus: Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair

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