Institute of Contemporary Arts

Sex Sells

Promotional material for COUM Transmissions’ exhibition Prostitution, 1976. Courtesy of Tate Archive

A talk held at the ICA on Monday 21 January 2008

In Richard Hamilton's 1956 description of pop art he insisted that it needed to be sexy. This has been the mantra of the designer, the performer and the advertising executive ever since. It has also, in different ways, 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 caused offence. Yet the small display of 70s 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:

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;

Kate Bush, head of art galleries at the Barbican.

Developed in association with Ben Cranfield and the London Consortium. Ben Cranfield is a collaborative doctoral award student at the ICA and London Consortium, currently working on an intellectual history of the arts in postwar Britain.

In association with the London Consortium.

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