Is this painting obscene?

I'm in London on vacation, enjoying many of the museums, including London's National Gallery.   Today I spotted the following painting, which is part of the National Gallery's collection: This is a painting by Palma Vecchio (painted around 1520).  The art gallery is open to all ages, including small children, and there were plenty of young children in the vicinity of this painting today.  The description next to this painting announces that the woman displays a "sensuous beauty" characteristic of Roman courtesans. Frankly, I find the woman in Vecchio's painting to be quite fetching, and I find the painting itself to be most excellent. To my eye, it is not in the least obscene.  But seeing it today made me think of Janet Jackson's "nipple" incident at the Superbowl XXXVIII.  What an incident that was, ending up with a fine of more than 1/2 million dollars for the TV network, and America ending all up bent out of shape because somehow . . . somehow . . . the sight of Ms. Jackson's nipple harmed children.   I strongly disagree with the attitude that the naked human body should be seen as perverse.  I have never seen any evidence that any child has ever been harmed by seeing a nipple; I've never seen any scientific evidence suggesting that it is harmful to view a nipple, despite millions of protests to the contrary (As to why so many Americans are so terrified about the public viewing of female nipples, I have a theory). Seeing this painting reminded me of  Dan Dennett's comment that people in American don't believe in God, but they believe in belief.    Likewise, we don't really believe that children are harmed by mere nakedness, but we believe in the belief that children are harmed by mere nakedness. If we  Americans really believed that mere images of nakedness and sexuality harmed children, we'd pass a law to remove quite a bit of art from our own museums, and we'd also take down quite a  bit of our suggestive advertisements currently on billboards and storefronts. It's incidents like Jackson's that make me think that we Americans are not even capable of having meaningful conversations anymore, unless the topic is sports, TV, movies, or consumer electronics. On important issues we'd rather yell at each other in tribal ways.

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Pretending to be one’s self.

Here's what happened when pop singer Jewel went to a karaoke bar incognito. You'll enjoy watching this prank, which was all in good fun. The fans recognized a good voice when they heard it. It's a different result from when concert violinist Joshua Bell played in the subway station. BTW, here's Jewel performing "Who Will Save Your Soul?"

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Music is like sex to the brain

New study on the pleasures of music reported by Discover Magazine:

[M]usic can activate the same reward circuits in the brain as food and sex. Participants listened to their songs of choice in a PET scanner, which detects the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, and again in an fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity. The scans showed that just before feeling enjoyable chills in response to the music, listeners experienced a dopamine rush near the frontal striatum, a brain region associated with anticipating rewards, followed by a flood of dopamine in the rear striatum, the brain’s pleasure center. “It’s like you’re craving the next note,” Salimpoor says.
Here's the study. I've also noted from my "anthropological" visits to Christian churches (here, for example), that people tend to sense the presence of Jesus during those emotional peaks that occur in the middle of religious music.  You can tell, because people start waving their hands in the air during those emotion-inducing parts of the music.  I've also noticed that Jesus becomes more intense when a song modulates to a new key.  Seems that Jesus likes the same aspects of music as his human worshipers.

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