The art of making a few quid

APAINTING featuring three blocks of colour sold for £61.5million at Sotheby’s in New York. It is by Mark Rothko who died in 1970. The work is entitled No.7. Rothko, an abstract expressionist, apparently did lots of No.7s.

At this price I’m not surprised. One critic said the painting: “Projects itself into our space on a greater than human scale, engulfing us entirely within its epic expanse.”

Of course it does. Three bands of paint is likely to do that.

But then I’m a philistine who couldn’t quite grasp the meaning when, a few years ago, a Huddersfield University student covered a field near Castle Hill with blue plastic and called it conceptual creation. If this was art, then my Uncle Austin was ahead of his time.

His medium was linoleum. He covered half the back lawn with lino and, when the grass on the uncovered bit grew too long, he dragged it from the flattened dead patch to cover the new and repeat the process: death and rebirth in nature and who knows the success that might have followed if he’d called it No.32 (he lived at No.32). Sadly, his talent wasn’t recognised but on the plus side he never had to mow the grass.

Promoted by the right critic it could have made the short list of the Turner prize, whose previous winning entries have included an unmade bed, an hour-long video of actors dressed as police offers standing still, and a bare room in which the lights turned on and off. I had a power fault like that once.

It is not widely known, but I went through an artistic phase as a young man myself and sold a palette knife impasto painting of my left foot to the editor of The Wilmslow Express for five shillings, which bought me a few pints.

What could my work have been worth today if discovered by a patron with more money than sense?

Art is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. When former Examiner journalist Richard Donkin moved to London, he once made loud and disparaging remarks about an artwork in formaldehyde that was displayed in a restaurant where he was dining, only to discover its creator Damien Hirst was at the next table.

Donkin was a national award-winning journalist and a Yorkshireman who knew what he liked. Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize in 1995 with a formaldehyde piece and knew how to make money. He is reputed to be the world’s richest living artist and was once quoted as saying: “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.”

Not that he does, of course. But I suspect he might have liked my left foot.