It's a tricky one, isn't it. I favour the more classical idea of art. I struggle with unmade beds and piles of bricks that have fetched a fortune. It's the Emperor's New Clothes to me.

I once went to The Tate Gallery is St. Ives, in Cornwall and went into a room where there was just a black canvas, or rather, a white canvas that had been painted black, all over. This painting had its own security guard, as it was worth so much. ??? People came in to stare and marvel at it, and I found myself looking at them, not the painting, as there er..was NO painting, just black paint. They got up close to it, walked far back from it, stared at it, turned their heads this way and that...Oohed and Aahed at it.

The kids had to take me out of the room in the end, because I got the giggles watching people being daft. I thought how unfair it was that 'artists' who do things like that get paid a fortune, and yet others who have the most amazing talent, are completely overlooked.

I think much art today has lost the plot completely. Dead sheep don't do it for me, nor casts of heads made from the blood of the artist himself, which had to be kept in a freezer and got awful messy when the workmen were working in Charles Saatchi's house and turned the freezer off by mistake. Ha! The money that changes hands for total rubbish is staggering and to me, incomprehensible, as well as immoral, but then I'm kinda weird like that.

Last Saturday I went round the National Portrait Gallery with my daughter, who loves art. She talked about the history inside each painting, the way the painting was painted and the reasons behind that, the messages that were so subtley conveyed by the artists of those times, etc etc etc..It was fascinating. I didn't get that staring at a small black canvas. Maybe that artist's idea was to get people to watch other people looking at his canvas, who knows, or cares...

Give me the old fashioned guys, any day.


My daughter's definition of art is something that causes a reaction, but I'm not sure I'd agree with her on that.

My definition of art is Beauty, in some form or another.