Good taste is so dull. Christmas deserves the full neon kitsch

It is the job of our great galleries and museums to delight, startle and occasionally dismay us – and we can usually rely on the V&A and Tate Britain to accomplish one of the three at this time of year, with the annual unveiling of their Christmas decorations. Who can forget the gasping and stretching of eyes that greeted Michael Landy’s bleak heap of festive trash for Christmas 2001, piled in a scarlet wheelie bin emblazoned with a cheery seasonal message?

Then there was Sarah Lucas’s 2006 Nordman fir, daintily hung with pink sculptures depicting “fairies’ genitalia”. Not to mention Matt Collishaw’s 1999 nod to The Nutcracker with a video of rats scampering beneath his tree, and Shirazeh Houshiary’s tree with gilded roots, suspended upside‑down from the Tate’s majestic ceiling in 1993 and recreated in 2016. (So perishable a commodity is outrage, however, that you can now find a considerable online archive of dangling Christmas trees, hoisted aloft by pet‑owners keen to prevent Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers from shinning up them.)

The V&A entrusts its decorations to designers, rather than fine artists, often with less confrontational results. Alexander Mcqueen and Tord Boontje’s Swarovski crystals, English Eccentrics’ red velvet, Kaffe Fassett’s paper fans – there was little there to distress visitors from the Shires.

This year, however, the situation has changed. The V&A has gone all conceptual with The Singing Tree, an installation by set designer Es Devlin that invites the public to contribute a festive word, to be transformed into an audiovisual carol that lights up the tree (we must hope that everyone plays nicely and eschews Poguesian profanity).

Meanwhile, Alan Kane for Tate Britain has gone full neon kitsch with Home for Christmas, plastering the Tate’s portico with illuminated snowflakes, prancing reindeer and that perennial favourite of the outer suburbs, a flashing Father Christmas nipping up a neon ladder.

According to the Tate’s website, Kane’s “inclusive, humorous work blurs the distinction between… perceptions of high art and low culture”. How

I wish my former next‑ door neighbour, Violet, were still alive. By early November each year, she had turned her front room into a glittering grotto of tinsel, fairy lights and plastic robins – a habit she continued well into her 10th decade. Like the Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme, astonished to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, she would have been delighted to learn that her fabulous Christmas style was an exercise in blurring the distinction between high art and low culture.

My son used to draw disobliging comparisons between the exuberance of Violet’s seasonal offering and my own austere efforts – a real tree, put up on Christmas Eve, with decorations from (where else?) the National Gallery. Belatedly, I realise he was right. Ivanka Trump’s much‑mocked “Thanksgiving tablescape” – a random collision of moss, driftwood and anaemic gourds, heaped in a giant clamshell – became the funerary monument for ghastly festive good taste.

The point of decking the halls is, after all, not to advertise your own refined aesthetic sensibility, or your supercool modish cynicism (there is plenty of opportunity to do that in the remaining 11 months of the year), but to cheer, amuse and entertain friends and strangers alike.

Violet understood that – and now, thanks to Alan Kane’s gloriously garish installation, it’s official. When it comes to Christmas decorations, the only way is neon.