Con-artists! JOHN HUMPHRYS reveals the conspiracy that makes 'worthless' art by Damien Hirst and co sell for a fortune

Tate Modern this week announced £5m sponsorship over the next 11 years



'There is plenty of good stuff in there. But there is a great deal of pretentious rubbish,' Humphrys says

D ealers give museums cut-price work as showing increases value, he says



Damien Hirst's Diamond skull. The multi-millionaire is one of Britain's wealthiest artists

You could hear the champagne corks popping all over London this week when the Tate Modern art gallery in London announced the biggest corporate sponsorship deal it has ever struck: at least £5m over the next 11 years.

Their benefactor is the South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai and you can see why the industry giant might want to forge links with Tate. Tate Modern gets more visitors than any other modern art gallery in the world: a whopping 4.7 million last year.

It also has what must surely be the most magnificent spectacle any gallery has to offer: the view from the north-facing windows across the Thames to the majesty of St Paul’s cathedral. Shame about the stuff inside. Actually, that’s not entirely fair.

There is plenty of good stuff inside. But there is also a great deal of pretentious rubbish and the clue to why that is so lies partly in the gallery’s name.



There’s a crucial distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ art. Modern art dates back to around 1870 and the decades that followed gave us Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cezanne and, of course, Pablo Picasso in Spain.

Contemporary art has given us such figures as Damien Hirst (he of the diamond-encrusted skull and pickled shark) and Tracy Emin and the Chapman Brothers. It may seem unfair to compare them to some of the greatest artists who ever lived, but that is what we are invited to do by galleries like the Tate, which hang their works alongside one another.

Most of us know precious little about what makes an artist great. We can, of course, employ the ‘Dunno nuffin’ about art but I know what I like’ formula — or we can put our faith in the experts. Surely if art galleries around the country are stuffed to the gunwales with the work of a handful of artists whose work sells for vast amounts of money, that must prove something? Well, yes, but maybe not what you’d think. Or hope.

The BBC’s brilliant arts editor Will Gompertz, who was the director of Tate Media in a previous incarnation, has long been sceptical of the value of much that passes for contemporary art. So he did something very simple — and immensely revealing.

He phoned the owners and directors of modern art galleries and, promising anonymity, asked how many of the artworks on their walls they thought had no right being there. They said at least a quarter of them.

So why did they put them there in the first place? Because there is a serious conflict of interest in the art world that leads to what ceramicist Grayson Perry — himself one of our most accomplished artists, though often better known for his cross-dressing than his pots — describes as a ‘conspiracy of silence’. Its root cause is that public museums and galleries around the world feel they have an obligation to show the work of so-called ‘brand name’ contemporary artists, but they struggle to survive financially. So a deal is struck.



Hirst poses in front of his artwork entitled 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' in the Tate Modern art gallery in April 2012

Art dealers are more than happy to give a top museum a cut-price bargain on one of their artists because they know that if their work is shown in a major public collection it can hugely increases the value of the work.

And if the dealer can’t quite afford to sell at such a low price he might solicit a contribution from one of his rich clients, who also just happens to collect work by the very artist in question.

And there’s another link in this chain of self interest. This wealthy individual might also be on the board of the gallery or museum, or a member of one of its many fundraising groups.

The collector, like the dealer, stands to gain from an increase in the value of the artist’s work now that he or she is represented in a major collection.

So everyone’s a winner. Except you and me of course. If the curators shower praise on ‘their’ artists’ work — even if some of it is palpably rubbish — how are we meant to know that they are effectively compromised?

'If the curators shower praise on ‘their’ artists’ work - even if some of it is palpably rubbish - how are we meant to know that they are effectively compromised?'

As Will told me, if they question the quality of an artist once he or she is represented in the institution’s collection, they risk alienating the wealthy collectors and patrons and even the art dealer who might well represent other artists the museum would like to collect. The upshot is that any public debate about the quality of an artist’s work — such as you expect in theatre, music or literature — is quashed because of compromises and conflicts of interest.

As to the intrinsic quality of contemporary art and, God help us, ‘conceptual’ art, where the ‘idea’ behind the work is more important than the way it looks . . . well, here I’m fortunate enough to have my own vast experience to draw on. Two weeks at Chelsea College of Art and Design to be precise.

Eight years ago I was foolish enough to take part in a BBC2 programme called Art School. For ten nights the cameras watched me and four other ‘celebrities’ being taught to become artists. I agreed to appear because I can’t draw, can’t paint and if I’m given a lump of clay to mould I end up producing something that looks exactly like a lump of clay. It hurts.

I hated it when my children asked me to draw a dinosaur, then wondered why I’d drawn a dustbin with legs.

I thought it unlikely that after a fortnight I’d sketch like Leonardo or paint like Rembrandt, but I did expect to learn something. And indeed I did. I learned most conceptual art is banal, pretentious rubbish without merit or meaning. It does not become art because the ‘artist’ says so.



Perhaps my biggest mistake was expecting to be taught technique. Every time I bleated at the teachers about it they’d give me rather pitying looks and suggest that other things are far more important. It’s true that an artist with skill but nothing to say is not a true artist.

But if you don’t have the basic skill you can’t say anything.

The rot set in more than 40 years ago. Richard Philp, an old friend of mine who’s now a distinguished dealer in antiquities, was a student at the Cardiff School of Art. Shortly after he left in the late Sixties, the word went out to art colleges around the land that traditional teaching was passe.



Modern artist Tracey Emin's 'To Meet My Past' Four poster bed

A generation later one of our leading sculptors, Michael Sandle, said: ‘I don’t teach my students how to draw any more; it’s likely to ruin their career’.

So if not the basic skills, then what? Experimentation. Ulrika Jonsson and I spent an afternoon in Chelsea messing about on a bed.

I’d better explain. Our ‘project’ was to take an old mattress, a scruffy wig, a water melon and a set of kitchen knives and turn them into a work of art. I had a bit of fun stabbing the mattress with a knife and Ulrika stuffed bits of hair through the holes.

It was hilarious nonsense, of course, but not according to the critic and curator Sacha Craddock, who was wheeled out every afternoon to appraise our work. She informed us that we had brought out its ‘mattressiness’. I promise that was her word. Thanks to the efforts of Ulrika and me, it had become a work of art.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you can make good art only by applying paint to canvas or a chisel to a block of marble. Of course artists must experiment with new materials and new techniques.

'In his early years Damien Hirst and many other Young British Artists, as they became known, made many people see art in a different light'

In his early years Damien Hirst and many other Young British Artists, as they became known, made many people see art in a different light. But great art must appeal to our hearts as well as our heads.

As for my own artistic tastes, when asked to choose the one artist I’d like to have hanging on my walls I’d plump for JMW Turner, which is a bit ironic in a way because he was, in his time, seen as something of an iconoclast.

You can imagine his stuffier critics ridiculing some of his later works in which, instead of painting recognisable figures or solid objects, he would create an impression of what he saw. ‘Pah! Nothing but a charlatan,’ they might have fulminated. ‘Can’t make out a bally thing! Just a splodge of paint!’

What his admirers recognised was that he was painting the effects of light.

In one of his most famous works, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’, the old warship is exquisitely portrayed in all its fine detail. But a few years later, when he painted a locomotive roaring towards him in ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, you can barely recognise any solid objects.

You don’t need to. The beauty and power of the painting makes you feel you’ve been hit by the steam train itself. It leaves you gasping. You wonder how he did it.

It may be a truism, but one test of a great artist is surely whether his art survives. Turner not only survives in his own works but in the influence he had on other great artists — Claude Monet in particular and the Impressionist movement that succeeded him.

The great British artist Francis Bacon, famous for his trios of contorted figures, said art must speak ‘directly to the senses’.