Critics charge that London’s National Gallery has prostituted itself (literally) putting on display a seedy reconstruction of Amsterdam’s Red Light District called The Hoerengracht (“Whore’s Canal”) as a contemporary art installation.

Curator Colin Wiggins defended his decision to feature both bulldings and scantily clad women displaying themselves in windows, saying that the “squalor” was not actually out of place in the reverentially proper London art institution.

“This is like walking into a 17th century Dutch painting of Amsterdam,” Wiggins said.

“We have pictures of gang rape, we have pictures of incest, we have pictures of murder and torture and mutilation, but because people put them in gold frames and cover them in varnish … they’re safe, they’re tame.”

The installation is the creation of Ed and Nancy Kienholz, who took about five years to make The Hoerengracht in Berlin. A via Reuters