Spencer Tunick is a master at getting large numbers of people naked in public places. Photos by Jacqueline Carini Jacquelinecariniphotography.com

Five hundred naked people awash in the bubbly spray of 500 shaken champagne bottles sounds a bit decadent even for South Beach. But how about a pool full of naked men struggling to mount green blowup rafts? Or nude women riding pink rubber floats?

For Spencer Tunick, an artist known around the world for photographing big groups of naked people, arranging such gatherings is no big deal — they’re just another day at the office.

Just two months ago, on Oct. 8, Tunick’s office was the beachfront Sagamore Art Hotel, where he shot the preceding scenes as part of an installation piece. On Monday, the volunteer models got to see for the first time what they looked like naked through Tunick’s lens.

“For me it was about a celebration of four years of making really good work, and I wanted to celebrate it with works of leisure and excess, and that’s where I am right now within the art world,” Tunick said.

Tunick has been busy during the last year. He convinced 18,000 men and women to strip naked and pose in Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución, his largest work ever.

In August, he shot 600 people lying naked on the icy cold Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland. The installation, commissioned by Greenpeace, was meant to bring attention to the melting of Swiss glaciers caused by global warming.

Tunick has made large-scale installations in cities all over the world, including Bruges, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Rome, San Sebastián, Săo Paulo, Caracas, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Santiago, Mexico City and Amsterdam.

Photos and videos are the final outcome of Tunick’s work, but he insists their creation is not a photo shoot.

“For me, I consider them installations; art installations that I document with photography and video,” said Tunick, 40.

Tunick unveiled the five large-scale photographs and two videos that recorded his Miami Beach experience at a champagne reception Monday for the volunteer nude models and media in the lobby of the Sagamore.

Fully clothed, the models sipped champagne and chatted as they looked for themselves on film. They used words like “liberating,” “exhilarating” and “unforgettable” to describe participating in Tunick’s performance.

“It had kind of a fear factor element to it, because it was about walking through that fear of being nude in public,” said Douglas Edmonds, a massage therapist.

Edmonds and many others said their feelings of anxiety and self-consciousness about posing nude were alleviated early in Tunick’s creative process.

“After five minutes, the nudity was just part of the norm,” said Alexi Manresa, holding a signed 8-by-10-inch print of the champagne scene he and the models were given for their participation. “Everyone was very respectful with eye contact.”

Paradoxically, Tunick’s installations clearly show the private parts of men and women of all sizes, shapes and grooming habits — from Brazilian wax to au natural — yet are not pornographic or sexually arousing.

“A person’s physical appearance, how old they were or how in-shape they were, all that was irrelevant,” Edmonds said. “It was just about skin tone and matching up people so that he had a nice even distribution of pigment.”

Still, in the United States, where Tunick believes attitudes about public nudity are often closed-minded, he at times has been treated as a common criminal. He’s landed in jail five times in New York City while trying to work, winning in court each time, and making big headlines.

“I always said that a day in jail is a small price to pay for your freedom of artistic expression,” Tunick said. “But after a few arrests, there’s nothing romantic about it anymore. So after I started getting arrested more and more, I decided, with my lawyer, to file a federal civil lawsuit against the city of New York, which was under the reign of [Rudy] Giuliani at the time.”

Tunick’s lawyer was Ronald Kuby, a partner of now-deceased radical civil rights attorney William Kunstler. The trio first met in 1994 after Kunstler looked out of his Greenwich Village office window and noticed Tunick taking photos of a man, woman and baby — naked and wrapped in clear plastic.

“Kunstler, ever the prescient lawyer, thought, ‘Someday this young man might need a lawyer,’ and he gave him our business card,” Kuby said.

Before the year ended, Tunick was arrested for promoting public exposure of a person while shooting a naked man lying face down over an eight-foot Christmas ball in Rockefeller Center. The model also was charged with public exposure. Kuby and Tunick beat that charge, and subsequent ones, but soon the police crossed a boundary Tunick couldn’t accept.

“Everything worked fine until Rudy Giuliani decided that what he would tell the police to do was to start arresting Spencer before he could take his pictures,” Kuby said. “At that point we sued in federal court.”

The judge ruled in Tunick’s favor and placed an injunction against the city of New York to prevent him from being arrested. The city appealed, and it went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The entire court was looking at naked photos,” Tunick said. “And then the entire court remanded it back down, and so I won against the Giuliani administration.”

Tunick admits that at one point in his career, the work, to a certain extent, was about pushing legal and societal bounds. But after spending years in court, he said, that is no longer true. He’s fascinated with the performance aspect, and the transcendent power in juxtaposing masses of nude bodies against landscapes, often cityscapes.

Tunick pointed at one of his latest works and said, “When you attach naked participants to a seven-story building, great things happen.”

Spencer Tunick’s works will remain on display at the Sagamore Hotel, 1671 Collins Ave., Miami Beach, through the conclusion of Art Basel Miami Beach on Dec. 9.