That Banksy may be a top ‘artwork’ but give me a great work of art any day

More people than ever, we are constantly told, visit art galleries; certainly in London, one of the world’s great repositories of Western painting. Clearly more people than in any previous generation are familiar with art, in its many forms; experts are never off our screens, explaining the wonders of the past. So what are we to make of the revelation that Girl with Balloon, by Banksy, the street artist, has been voted the nation’s favourite artwork?

Not much. The sample group for the survey, conducted on behalf of Samsung, which is bringing out a new telly, comprised only 2,000 people, who were asked to select from a rag-bag of familiar images, including LP covers by The Beatles and Pink Floyd, and Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. It is utterly dishonest to pass off this kind of stunt as anything other than PR puffery.

“Artworks”! What rot. The word’s main distinction is that it rhymes with, “Ostler, can you take my horse to the shed behind the cartworks?” Or “007, pay attention while I tell you how this poisoned dart works”.

Did Joshua Reynolds, over coffee in The Strand, say to George Romney: “Come and admire my latest artwork”? One can’t really imagine Thomas Gainsborough writing to inform Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews: “I have completed the artwork you commissioned, and it is really rather fine.”

There are paintings, sculptures and, if we absolutely must have them, in-stall-ations. Let’s leave artworks with Alan Yentob and Will Gompertz, the Pinky and Perky of modern arts reporting.

Take a butcher’s at that Banksy mural, which has touched so many hearts. Is the little girl looking wistfully at the heart-shaped balloon, or would she be happy never to see it again? Like Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, spotted by the drowning sailors, will it bless her, or is it drifting off into the sky? Or is it just a slice of kitsch, suited to the sentimentality of an age obsessed by empty images? Members of the jury, it is entirely a matter for you.

Now take a look at The Hay Wain, John Constable’s masterpiece of early 19th-century realism, which Banksy’s daub has relegated to No2 in this all-time pop chart.

The Hay Wain is a familiar image: too familiar, some might say. But it has earned its place in our hearts as a slice of English pastoral life that links the classical and Romantic ages, looking back to the Dutch masters from whom Constable absorbed so much, and forward to the French artists like Charles-françois Daubigny, who in turn admired Constable.

That is the way artists replenish the stock of art, by learning and passing on. Similarly, JMW Turner (represented in this Top 20 by The Fighting Temeraire) did more than anybody to inspire the great Romantic French painters, from Gustave Courbet onwards, which opened the floodgates to Impressionism and beyond.

“If you’re gonna steal,” as Leonard Bernstein said when he was accused of borrowing from Igor Stravinsky for West Side Story, “steal classy.” In his case, theft led to the transformation of a different art form.

So let Banksy have his day in the sun, though it will be occluded fairly soon when the next big thing grabs the popular imagination. But Constable and Turner, and David Hockney for that matter, will not be silenced. Great works of art, as opposed to artworks, will always speak to us.