I'd love to go to this on my way to the Led Zepp reunion concert....
The City of London police have been in, and, says Graham Sheffield, artistic director of the Barbican, "they are completely cool. We're kosher." That means, come Friday, the first ever mainstream exhibition devoted to sex will be unleashed upon an unsuspecting British public.
According to co-curator Martin Kemp: "We are not setting out to shock, but it is certainly provoking." Marina Wallace, another of the curators, added: "We want London to be thinking about nothing but sex for three months."
Graphic hardly does justice to the romp through 2,000 years of art history's frankest moments. But the organisers argue that context is all: which is why Robert Mapplethorpe's fetish photographs; Nan Goldin's slide of a man ejaculating while having sex with his male partner; even an eye-opening 18th century Arabic manuscript illustrating 10 men having group sex, are all absolutely fine by the police.
This is a serious, art-historical exhibition, which is why even potentially controversial material - such as certain photographs by Goldin showing nude children as part of her sometimes explicit work Heartbeat - is, according to the curators, acceptable.
[From The art of seduction: sex through the ages, from every possible angle | Art & Architecture | Guardian Unlimited Arts]
