Peter,
THanks for the (sort of) compliment. I also have a vast collection of artistic nudes. What the assorted and sundry folks on the forum seem to enjoy more is celebrity nudes, which I also have a huge collection of -- amusingly enough, up until I started posting them here I hardly ever looked at them; I just accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, like Mary Kate in Cat's Cradle except she had the good sense to accumulate wealth, whereas I am accumulating digitised photographs of naked women.
I posted some really genuinely interesting photos of body-painted women in a thread entitled "The H.I.P. Horoscope." You might look it up; the work on some of them is nothing short of amazing (especially Scorpio, and my own sign , Sagittatius.)
I also think that 'artistic' nudes is somewhat of a thrown around term. You have photographers like Norway's Peter Hegre, who does excellent work, but I am uncertain why it's called "art" aside from the fact that no one's ever heard of the models. I am reminded of the way that all through the 70's and 80's, as the concept of the "supermodel" was born and developed, none of them would ever consider posing nude in a magazine such as [i[Playboy[/i]. Then one day Herb Ritts did an amazing nude layout of Raquel Welch, then another of Sigourney Weaver, then the famous 1988 PLayboy spread of Cindy Crawford, then suddenly it was smut if Bob Guccione wanted it, but *art* if Herb Ritts did. The lines drawn between 'art', 'entertainment' and 'pornography' seem tenuous at best.
Phaedrus