It’s boring and hideously over-priced COMMENT
IF I took money from you, saying I was going to spend it for your benefit and buy, let us say, a new sofa, then not only bought one which you didn’t like, but kept it myself and said you couldn’t use it, you would be outraged.
That is exactly what is going on here – public money spent on art which the public can’t see and which the public doesn’t want.
Edmund de Waal presents a set of shelves with five dozen porcelain vessels on them. If this was in someone’s front room it would be tasteful but unremarkable. It certainly wouldn’t be worth £126,000. Such art is pretentious, boring and hideously overpriced.
A photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans comes in at £66,114.72. For this sort of money, you might expect something stunning, unique, historic even. It is indeed stunning – because of its sheer banality. It shows a set of three windows lit up at night. In comparison, the average family photo album is a work of artistic genius.
A photograph by Anne Hardy is apparently of a “mysterious scene depicting a workspace filled with objects, cables, diagrams and charts”. It looks very much like my front room when my builder Kevin was halfway through redecorating. Similarly, Caragh Thuring, who has cost the public £28,500 for an 8ft canvas covered with twelve lines of semi-illegible red scribble. This kind of art is notoriously shown in the Turner Prize and bought by the Tate – more than 75 per cent of whose collection is in storage, so why can’t the Government borrow some of that?