Spencer Tunick Invades Sydney With Nude Army

It was apparently a cold day in Sydney, Australia today. In all the ways you might imagine we mean.

Photographer/nude-ographer Spencer Tunick is back in Australia and, this time, he's got an army of 5,200 people with him to storm the world-renowned Sydney Opera House.

"It doesn't feel sexual, it just feels tribal - a gathering of humanity.

"I thought it would be all old people and nudists, but everyone here is great."

Advertising creative director Adam Sutherland, 46, said he had not yet decided whether to tell his employees, while nurse Nerida Grant, 27, said she wouldn't miss it for anything, saying: "I love [Tunick's] art work, it's fun."

"We weren't quite expecting the 'embrace' part but it was good.

[Whoops. Sorry about that.]

"It's not every day you get to be naked on the steps of the Opera House." [SMH]

...but it should be, should it not? Mardi Gras: The Base, as today's installation has been dubbed by its artist, is the kind of transcendent experience that people are really missing on today while their noses are buried in technology and the Great Disconnect. As Tunick put it to the media: "Gay men and women lay naked next to their straight neighbours and this delivered a very strong message to the world that Australians embrace a free and equal society."

The embrace that participant was talking about, by the way, was for one photograph in which Tunick asked everyone to pair up and hug their neighbor, regardless of their own sexual orientation and the neighbor's gender.

Image.