Three color,s,

I feel very sorry for the Brit art people, it must be rather galling for them to see the expertise and skill of properly trained artists, and for them to realise that their training was incomplete. In addition there is no doubt that the Saatchi Brothers (who have no idea of art values at all) have taken full advantage of selecting them with the sole aim of making money. Recently I went to the Watercolour exhibition at the Tate Britain gallery, which was quite interesting but fell down badly when trying to indicate the most modern examples. John

An interesting point - would you, awash with cash as they are, feel strangely inadequate in the face of (for the sake of argument for a minute) 'properly trained' artists? I honestly don't know - perhaps I ought, in my own interests, to be dominated by the urge for money, but I don't have it in me: I just want to paint better (and Lord knows, there's plenty of scope for that). This isn't in any sense a virtue - I don't have any choice. I have no idea, to be honest, what motivates Hirst, Emin - and countless new British artists who may or may not have followed in their wake. I'm not sure how far one can enter the mindset of any artist: I saw paintings from a young British artist, straight out of art school, in Artists and Illustrators a while ago: I thought the work puerile - clumsy, boring, technically so appalling that I'd expect it to fall off the canvas in flakes in due course... I don't know what that proves, if anything at all. However: I believe that without a basic level of technical competence, you have no business presenting your work to the public, still less selling it. You could say, on the other hand, that art is of the moment; spontaneous; longevity doesn't matter, isn't even relevant - except: well, it is. If the works of the past hadn't survived, we wouldn't be able to comment on them today. Now, we have the internet on which work can be preserved in perpetuity - however, how much has been lost in the process? Quite a bit, I suspect. I think the one guarantee that good quality art will survive is the innate self-respect of most artists: lose that, and we've all had our chips.

The August 2011 Edition [84] Art of England Art Magazine has an interesting 4 page article: Tracey Emin; Love is What You Want by Estelle Lovatt. Estelle Lovatt art critic for BBC Radio 2's flaghip arts programme The Arts Show with Claudia Winkleman. Art Critic Art of England magazine. Sort of a 20 year career as an artist review that concludes that fame & money were achieved but no progress as an artist...sad really.