Vitriolic about Vettriano

 

I've been reading Duncan Macmillan's monumental history of Scottish Art  1460 - 2000. I have to say it's a good read, if you like that sort of thing, which I do and I admire Macmillan greatly for his knowledge, his scholarship and the way that he has rehabilitated Scottish Art and placed it in a European Context, rather than letting it languish as an unregarded and unappreciated cousin of the art produced south of the border.

[It's a failing I find, generally, amongst English scholars, that they ignore any cultural production that pre-dates the Union of the Parliaments and dismiss most of the Scottish work that came afterwards by the effective device of ignoring almost all of it. Art, literature, and music have all suffered in this way. Economists, scientists and engineers have generally just been annexed: how many people educated in England for example would know that Adam Smith was a Scot?]

But hey-ho, it's not cultural colonialism that concerns me here but Macmillan's attitude to Jack Vettriano, a dislike which borders on the splenetic and which is shared by much of the art establishment in Britain as a whole.

Now don't get me wrong. I like  Vettriano's work, but I make no claims for him as a great artist. I long ago realised that my response to art was largely a response to colour which explains my liking for the Flemish Primitives, the Nabis and both waves of the Pre-Raphaelites.  It doesn't make me a critic; in fact it rather debars me from trying.

But what I don't understand is why the critics have to get so worked up about Vettriano. Just let him be, for goodness sake.  You don't like his stuff, ignore it.  Macmillan calls Vettriano's success 'extraordinary', a manifestation of 'consumer art' [obviously a dirty concept], a man who 'peddles nostalgia in paintings that are vaguely erotic'. They are 'blankly executed with cardboard cut out drawing' and yet they 'sell like hot cakes'.

 

To be honest the whole page reads like an  angry distorted and jealous snobbery. It seems Macmillan's main problem with Vettriano is that he sells. His work has nothing to say to Macmillan and his ilk, and so they're angry that the public like it enough to buy it. It doesn't challenge public taste or public perception about art or anything else and therefore it shouldn't be successful, especially since the sort of art they admire doesn't sell by the bucket load.

 

But critical and public taste are often not in sync. Despise people all you like Mr Macmillan but they will buy what they like and hang it on their walls and enjoy it. And for all your pontificating about the purposes of art, is not one of those purposes to enhance the life of an individual? To give them pleasure and/or to help them see the world in a slightly different way? You can't tell people what to like and , if millions of them find that sort of pleasure and enhancement in a picture of Vettriano's, who really are you to say them nay?