The two biggest water cooler talking points bubbling up from the freckles-and-all naked Lindsay Lohan spread in New York magazine this month: 1. Ooh. Is that a good career move? And 2. Hey! They're real!

"Obviously you can see her breasts are real," Lohan's longtime publicist Leslie Sloane Zelnik tells Radar. On the first point, though, New York may have pulled a bit of a fast one. The plan to publish nudes—a monumental move in her career—was never made clear, Lohan's rep says. Photographer Bert Stern, the now 78-year-old most famous for getting Marilyn Monroe to strip on film six weeks before her overdose on barbiturates (then going ahead and publishing contact sheets Monroe had exed out with red marker), suggested a much less revealing homage for the mag. A rumor from the very closed set suggests Stern dangled the possibility that the nudes would be displayed only in a museum or as part of his book and that the tamer shots would go to New York.

Stern did not immediately return messages left via phone and e-mail. Lauren Starke, communications manager for New York tells Radar in a statement, "We're very grateful to Lindsay Lohan for participating in this historic photo shoot with Bert Stern and we hope that she is as pleased with the beautiful results as we are."

When asked what sort of career move this might be for Lohan, Howard Bragman of 15 minutes PR says that, given the chance, he would have steered Lohan away from the shoot. It isn't so much nudity as the wrong kind of attention it inspires, he says. "She needs to get back to acting. I'd rather see her do a student film at USC than take her clothes off in a look-at-me-moment. These shots run the real risk of overshadowing her acting career." (Lohan stars in Dare to Love Me, due for an '08 release.)

Even the New York story accompanying the spread, in which Lohan comes off as deliberate and smart, subtly raises a similar point, noting that when Stern shot Monroe, she had come off of some negative publicity and her sexuality had far outpaced her acting.

"For New York magazine, it's a brilliant move. For her, it's a terrible idea,"
Ronn Torossian of 5WPR tells Radar. "For the last six weeks, she hasn't been in trouble, and then she does this.... It's okay for her to not be in the news right now."

Lohan is said to be proud of the shots and thrilled to a part of the nod to one of her idols, and Zelnik points out that Lohan is a grown woman obviously making an artistic choice, "but at the end of the day," she says, "I was shocked by this."