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	Dear Uncle Jackdaw, "You will be on the Deaccessioning Committeeî announced the Director after I’d informed him that I’d rather be at the Jobcentre than bored and exploited. ìYou shall also be on the Selection Committeeî he beamed, forgetting to add that neither existed. These committees are inventions, a sop to eager artists who think that a donation to our collection would be appreciated. I swooned at dabbling in the question of good and bad art. Appeased and nominally promoted, I still work for Worthwhile Art (or a charity to that effect)" No naked people, no religion, no scary eyes, no outsider art and no children’s art is the policy of these phantom committees. Desperate to please the Charity Commission, the Arts Council and HRH Prince Charles (revered Patron), our charity filters art to protect society from its own bad taste. It must take a very worthy ìcommittee memberî to forget that the public are daily subjected to far worse than could ever be depicted on a canvas, Russell Brand in London Lite for instance. Bad art is a lot easier to find than good art. I went to the Affordable Art Fair under the impression that I would see the best prints, drawings and photos by up-and-coming contemporary artists. Error. Amateurishly hung with the density of a 19th century Salon were endless seedy oils of suggestive women, twee safari animals and sentimental still lives. Photorealism had been corrupted by artists not realising that colours could be blended, and the abstracts were dulled by their imitative quality: Mondrianesque or School of Albert Irvin. Do dealers have no shame? Surely the customers can’t want to buy this meretricious tacky art, let alone see it every day in their apartments? There’s a Catch 22. As long as the clients think that this art is fashionable, the dealers will put on lavish, convincing exhibitions of drivel. It was bemusing to see the guests looking so much more beautiful and interesting than the art, endorsing this art with their presence. The market for bad art stems from an innate insecurity of taste. They’ve been told some art is good and some is bad. They know art can make you lots of money if you choose the right piece. My friends are very interested in art, but feel they haven’t learnt enough about it, so have no authority to discuss it. Or they want me to buy art because I can tell what will be a good investment. That’s not the point. You’re meant to enjoy it. How in our society, where creativity is nurtured from an early age, have we got to a point where art has nothing to do with visual impact and instead is judged by name, price tag and reputation? Art world outsiders are discouraged by the disparity of art. The works of dead greats in museums are compared to Èlite Cork Street gallery shows and then to the trendy East End First Thursdays galleries. Rarely do the insiders from each group cross paths. If they do, the museum workers’ disapproval of commerce, the snobbism of Mayfair and the arrogance of pretentious Shoreditch leave the outsider with little sense of whom to trust, who are the modern masters, what is good. Instead of buying originals, they go to Ikea and cart off an oversized reproduction of a flower or of Paris. Not to look at, but to have something uncontroversial over the sofa, something similar enough to everyone else’s. Today, spectators are scared of being wrong. For the same reason, I can find no controversial young art critics. The art charity worker feels justified in censoring subject matter to protect the audience from its own bad taste. The uninitiated viewer feels under pressure to be visually discerning, to present a short monologue on the nuances of a translation from eye to emotion. It is no wonder with all these contradictory indications on how to judge good and bad art that visitors relish the black hole in the Tate’s turbine hall. Let Auntie know about my new roles as committee member, she’ll be proud. Love Snipe


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Snipe • Jan/Feb 2009 • Mar/Apr 2009 • May/June 2009 • Jul/Aug 2009 • Nov/Dec 2009 • Jan/Feb 2010 All of this site is © The Jackdaw - a newsletter for the visual arts 2010. Drawings are by wood engraver Ian Stephens - contact him on: 01604 460457.