Having a pop at the absurdities of contemporary art has long been a sport beloved of elements of the press, and it has often been enjoyably and wittily played. The Sun, for example, had great fun in 2001, when Martin Creed won the Turner prize, inviting readers to suggest their own ideas to add to Mr Creed’s scrunched-up paper, Blu-Tack, and lights switching on and off. The British love to puncture anything with a whiff of pretension. Not taking oneself too seriously is regarded as a precious national virtue.
Yet the tone of rightwing attacks on contemporary art has sharpened this year in the wake of the Brexit vote, as the critic JJ Charlesworth pointed out in ArtReview magazine. Michael Gove tweeted on the night of the Turner prize that the works were mere “modish crap” celebrating “ugliness, nihilism and narcissism – the tragic emptiness of now”. He later complained that the “last thing you should try to do if you want to win the Turner is apply oil to a canvas in a manner which is any way representational of man or nature”. He must have missed recent Turner shortlists that have featured figurative work by painters including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and George Shaw, as well as Paul Noble, who makes exquisitely detailed drawings.
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