I used to think that Seduction was a science, and it’s easy to see why. If you follow a few simple rules, you end up with more love, friends and sex in your life.

But thinking a little deeper, any strategy I may suggest to you now will not guarantee that you the meet the person of your dreams, and it certainly wouldn’t work 100% of the time. Whereas if I told you how to synthesise some chemical compound, build an electronic circuit or even bake a cake; then so long as you take care, and have enough intelligence to follow my instructions properly, you know what to expect at the end of the process. And, as creator I would know what response someone would have - repeatedly.

However, if I were to write a play, compose music, or paint a picture then I will have had an intended response in mind during the creation process, but ultimately I cannot control what response you will have to my oeuvre. For this reason, I consider that Seduction is closer to an art than a science.

Whilst everything can be art, to claim “everything is art” is just lazy thinking. I could equally claim “everything is science”; since there is chemistry involved in painting, engineering governs much of sculpture and physics controls the harmonics of music etc. Although if you’re still not convinced, please contact me, as I have a dumpster full of art to sell you!

Now, I believe that there is a need for more serious study of art and seduction to be undertaken. Matters of seduction are too often relegated to the Humour section of bookshops, with perhaps the most serious studies being the “How to get your man to do what you want, whilst keeping him happy and upholding your Feminist principles” articles to be found in certain women’s magazines.

I would expect that art specialists would be perfectly positioned to tell us something about the relationship between biology and the erotic workings of the mind, because there are many great works of art of a sexual nature. Then there is erotica, and finally there is smutty literature of the type found in Soho sex shops, yet all depict essentially the same thing. More mysteriously, the people upset by this last category are often the same people who will gaze in wonderment at a painting of a naked lady.

Pornography and art seem to have gone hand-in-hand for longer than records exist, and with each new art medium pornography soon followed. So, perhaps originally, there was no dividing line, or maybe it just fluctuated over the centuries, as society wavered between repression and hedonism.

The Barbican’s exhibition Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now is curated by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein, all of whom seem to be well qualified and respectable curators. Thus, it’s disappointing that they have only managed to produce a collection of dry, uninformative pornography. Perhaps I missed something, but we learn nothing of the heritage of pornography, none of the art is put into context, and it’s not explained how the exhibited artists changed the circumstances in which art becomes porn or vice versa. Perhaps we’re just to assume that if Pornography is shown often enough, it’ll somehow transform itself into art.

During my visit to the exhibition, I found the other visitors more interesting than the artworks. The former being an interesting mixture of average people off the street, art anoraks, and the fetish crowd (complete with big boots, PVC clothing and outsize hats); whilst the latter consisted of a scant array of international pornography through the ages, and seemed to induce more sniggering from the visitors than thought provocation.

As someone who admittedly is still learning about fine arts, I left the exhibition without any clue as to whether a Jeff Koons picture, for example, was art, pornography or erotica.

The curators could have shed some light on why early pornographic films had a storyline and were very tender, yet so much modern pornography is just violent fucking. How does pornography relate to the films and TeeVee programmes we see these days? They could even have investigated differences between homosexual and lesbian pornography – but they’ve kept the exhibition almost entirely heterosexual, apart from a few early paintings.

So, ultimately, I’m not even sure why the exhibition is called Seduced. It would certainly have been more interesting if we had been seduced by it. But, unfortunately I can’t say I really learned anything new. Although I’m sure the fetish crowd could have shown the curators a few new things, given the chance.

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Posted by Jonathan in Art & Literature, Reviews