Sex Sells: Erotic Experience and Controversy as Curatorial Method

Richard Hamilton's description of pop art from 1956 insisted that pop art needed to be sexy. This has been the mantra of the designer, the performer and the advertising executive ever since. It has also, at times, been a position adopted by the curator - after all, sex sells.

Prostitution (ICA, 1976), a now infamous show, has endured in part because of its explicit content. Even in its revisited form at the Tate Triennial last year, the gallery had to physically segregate the work in case it might cause offence. Yet the small display of 1970s porn with artist Cosey Fanni Tutti's retrospective musings was one the most popular exhibits.

Does sex still have the power to shock? Is controversy still one of the highest aims of the curator?

Speakers include John Russell (artist), Tamar Garb (Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art, University College London), Lynda Nead (Pevner Professor of History of Art, Birkbeck), Sarah Kent (art critic and broadcaster) and Kate Bush (Head of Art Galleries at the Barbican).

In association with the London Consortium and London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise