Bell has no patience with ignorant folks who seek out pictures, poems, or music for these reasons. They are simply confusing the sensual and the aesthetic. Of course, this does not mean that paintings depicting pretty girls cannot be art. They can, but if they are art, they will be so despite their erotic content. For example, when Manet’s Olympia, a picture of a prostitute, caused a storm of indignation in Paris of the 1860s, Emile Zola defended the painting in terms that Bell would have approved of: