 The more erotic a work of art, the more difficult it is to appreciate aesthetically. Matthen makes this claim in an essay review of The Art Instinct (2009), a book on evolutionary aesthetics written by Denis Dutton, who also claims that eroticism is best avoided in art, though for different reasons than Matthen. While the latter considers the sexual response too distracting, Dutton argues that it is rather too crude and too basic to count as a proper aesthetic response. A high degree of meaning-complexity is the hallmark of all great art, according to Dutton, but while love is complex, “(s)ex itself is just too simple” (2009: 238). As a consequence, 