Men and women come into this world naked. Yet from that moment on, or so it appears, nudity is the subject of embarrassment. It seems strange that grown men would actually pay serious money to watch others (mostly women, admittedly) remove their clothing. And perhaps it is only in Scandinavia that such activities attract not appropriate disapproval but a debate about the rights and wrongs of taxation in this area.

Theories offered down the ages have touched on the alchemic commodification of disinhibition, the intrinsically beguiling nature of process as opposed to stasis and even human sexuality. Now, to the inevitable dismay of behavioural psychologists, a Norwegian appeals court has come up with something more concise: striptease is art.

So to Botticelli’s Venus and Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze must be added the Blue Angel’s Diamond Go Go girls from Oslo. The court ruled that they are as much performers as they would be playing Ibsen in the Norwegian National Theatre’s Hovedscenen. Therefore, their employer is entitled to the same exemption from VAT on ticket sales, and so are strip club owners nationwide.

The Dukhobors, a fundamentalist Orthodox sect still thinly represented in British Columbia, traditionally tore off their clothes and marched naked in public to register their displeasure over heresy and impropriety. They would doubtless have bared all over this. Gordon Brown would never condone it, either; he needs the VAT. The striptease industry is hardly the first place to start a campaign for lower business taxation. Yet the Norwegians have a point, if only a semantic one: If artless undressing is not striptease, does it not follow that striptease must be artful?