Seduced: Art & Sex From Antiquity to Now is the hugely ambitious new exhibition at London's Barbican Centre. Featuring over 250 works of art and spanning over 2000 years, it shows us the human sexual impulse from every conceivable angle. Dazed caught up with Martin Kemp, one of the exhibition's three curators, to find out more about the exhibition and its aims.

Squirming through the Grecian, Renaissance, Baroque, and Postmodern periods with work by the likes of Koons, Caracci, Goldin, Bacon, Dumas and Picasso, Seduced spans practically the whole of recorded art history and challenges held notions of gender, voyeurism and pornography, never failing to surprise. (How often do you get the chance to stand around with a bunch of strangers considering graphic sculptures from the brothels of Pompeii?) "Sex is so seldom discussed and is usually either trivialised or sensationalised, yet it is so vital," says Joanne Bernstein, one of the exhibition's three curators. "Seduced wants to examine it, to get away from the world of misrepresentation."

The early work, created for brothels or private collections, is, of course, pornographic in intention, but taken from historical context it allows for a multiplicity of perspectives. After that, you are exposed to everything from Rembrandt's erotic etchings and Bourgeois's meditations on emotional connection to Marlene Dumas's unsettling paintings of auto-erotic stimulation and Andy Warhol's classic short Blow Job. Add to the mix early paintings of copulating nymphs and satyrs, Jeff Koons's portraits of the Italian porn star Cicciolina, Noboyushi Aaraki's dark, playful and erotic photography and Nan Goldin's graphic portraits and you get some idea of the exhibition's scope.

Much of this more contemporary introduces a far more homoerotic, gender-bending edge, raising the question of whether our sexual evolution is anywhere near over. As outdated gender boundaries become less defined are we are all, to some degree, becoming more sexually amorphous? Will we even talk in terms of men and women in decades to come, or come the year 2525 will we all begin to ascend to the dizzy androgynous heights of Bowie's 'Homo Superior'?