Richard Paul's piece is amusing and thought-provoking. It would work well on an afternoon Weekend Edition news magazine. Morning might be a little too early - we're all still staring bleary eyed at ourselves in the bathroom mirror. Great bits of music add oomph to the piece. I might add that while listening to Naked People, I was reminded of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's clothing of Lady Justice's bare breast during his tenure in Washington, D.C. He didn't want her breast peeking over his shoulder while he was giving press conferences.

Is nudity always artistic? Not the first time this question has been asked, but it's the first time I heard a radio story about it that tries to analyze it a bit. And it isn't tacky at all. I could hear this any time of the day, weekday or weekend.

As a painter, the only critique I have of this piece is that the producer missed a great opportunity to explore why clothing is harder to paint than the human body. That's a fascinating point.

Pieces about the visual arts are hard to do on radio. So is humor. This piece presented much food for thought -- but unfortunately, too quickly. It needed to breathe more. Also, the humor it contained tended to be unnecessarily broad and cutesy, especially when the producer assumed that I was thinking (wink, wink!) of...you know what (wink, wink, wink!).

Well, I wasn't. I was thinking of something else:

I was thinking about the time one of my art reports was censored on public radio (the only time). It was in the mid-1990s, when I produced a story for a national news program about an exhibition of work by a gay photographer of yesteryear -- Wilhelm von Gloeden.

Even National Geographic Magazine acquired some of Von Gloeden's more chaste photos, of 19th century Sicilian landscapes and village life. But it was his depictions of peasant youths posed against scenic backdrops of Roman ruins and Mt. Etna, playing pan-pipes, wearing veils or leopard skins -- or nothing at all -- that became all the rage at the turn of the last century.

Wilhelm von Gloeden got along just fine with his neighbors in Sicily, and -- honorable man -- paid his models a commission. His nudes were extremely popular; and so they remain, for they are wonderfully sensual and evocative -- and poignant too, for the lads would be around 120 years old by now.

According to modern critics (and this was the crux of my radio report), Von Gloeden's pictures struct a chord for reasons beyond the erotic:

Apparently the Victorians and Edwardians suffered from generational angst brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, when a generation of golden youths perished in the trenches. These were shattering events, and for some people Von Gloeden's nudes offered not only a certain frisson, but also escape from the present into an imaginary Arcady, a Never-Never Land, a past Golden Age that was so much pleasanter than anything the grim, grey 20th Century seemed likely to offer.

That at least was the gist of my report, but it got yanked from the show at the last minute: the program editor worried that listeners would think the network was condoning...child abuse.

So much for presenting male frontal nudity -- on radio.

-- Alex van Oss

Zippy editing and some great clips -- "... you can almost see a heartbeat ..." -- are the highlights of this lighthearted yet thoughtful feature on what we see (or don't see) when we see nudes. Shades of John Berger, and Deborah Tannen, and that statue at Justice whose modesty was restored by John Ashcroft.

The narrator lapses a bit when he pretends to know that the listener is having leering thoughts. (Sorry - not that kind of duck.) But these moments are very brief, and barely slow the momentum of an expertly produced piece. Toward the end there's some unexpected, exuberant use of music - and you have to smile. This piece would be much at home on a Studio 360 sort of show.