Why Picasso is crap

Many people say ‘I may not know much about art but I know what I like’. Such people tend not to like Picasso. I say ‘I know a lot about art and I know what I like… and I don’t like Picasso’. To be fair it’s not just Picasso who I dislike; he’s simply the most famous of a whole raft of artists who’ve conned the gullible.

That ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ cannot be argued against, and that art ‘buyers pays their money and takes their choice’ is on an equally firm footing. The sad thing is that beauty is not a consideration for many art buyers. The international art market is a futures market: they’d buy a brick if they thought they could sell it for more tomorrow than they bought it for today (Carl Andre staggers to mind under his enormous pile of bricks which were taken of his hands by the Tate gallery in London, much to his relieve no doubt). So let’s not worry about the ‘art’ market, it’s not going to go away as long as people are still making money and I suspect few in it kid themselves it’s about art… though they may kid others.

Which brings me back to Picasso. Picasso, a by-word for great art, lauded as the greatest artist of the last century. Well I’m no Picasso, so let me try and show you his art without the rose tinted hype surrounding it.

Perhaps Picasso’s most acclaimed (certainly written about) painting is ‘Guernica’, it’s subject is war. It is simply bad. A large sprawling cat’s cradle of various parts of cartoon characters painted with all the control, grace, subtlety and flair of a eight year old scrawling a dirty picture on a classroom chalk board. And yet this painting is considered his finest work, a powerful condemnation of war said to have reduced people who’ve seen it to tears. Why? Because it’s a Picasso, those people have paid 15€ to see the greatest painting of the 20th centenary and that’s what they see. Shrink it to A3 and stick it up on the wall of their kid’s school and no one would look at it twice.

Now before you think this rant (er, it’s a BLOG, Ed.) is all about rubbishing other, more successful painters(er, I thought that’s exactly what we’re about, Ed.) let me show you another painting. Far less well know than Guernica but far more deserving of  acclaim. Its subject is war, the same as Guernica’s, but in its execution it is ever thing Guernica is not. Shrunken to any size and stuck anywhere this painting draws attention and speaks for itself, it is John Sargent’s ‘Gassed’.