For Those Who Have Eyes by 1987 winner Richard Deacon. Photograph: Rosie Greenway/Getty
This week Philip Roth publishes the last in his great series of novels featuring his alter ego the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. I got a lot of my ideas about writing - about why people write at all - from those books, especially from Zuckerman Unbound, in which we meet his hero as he tries to deal with the notoriety of having published an apparently autobiographical novel about masturbation and Jewish family life called Carnovsky. The idea I got from Roth is that to write is to misbehave: to defame and desecrate and do wrong. Writing is mischievous, it is irresponsible.
This applies to the genre of writing in which I specialise, art criticism, as much as it does to novels about New Jersey. This is why my favourite modern art critic is, and always will be, Robert Hughes - because when you read the extraordinary Swiftian excoriations of 1980s American art in Hughes' collected essays, Nothing If Not Critical, you are exposed to a voice speaking freely, pleasing itself, relishing its rage.
As a matter of fact I disagree with Hughes about most things. But none of the critics the contemporary art world would name as a better model can hold a candle to Hughes as a writer. I find David Hickey, the most praised American critic of today, for example, smooth and honed in a way that ultimately makes me shrug. I like writing that has guts and energy. In an art critic this means not saying the right thing, not talking the bland language of a Tate spokesman.
Which brings me to Simon Wilson, who used to be just that, a Tate spokesman. I used to cringe every time he popped up to "explain" the art in the Turner Prize - he did it a disservice with his mandarin platitudes. Frankly, if Wilson eulogised Rembrandt's self-portraits, I'd go off them. And now this robot writes to The Guardian questioning my competence as an art critic.
Right. I've had enough of this stuff about Jonathan Jones not playing on the contemporary art team. There are two camps in British art, and both are ridiculous. On the one side you have know-nothing conservatives for whom only figurative painting is proper art. On the other side you have people like Wilson whose championing of the contemporary is so defensive and narrow it's like subscribing to a political party. The old farts have no power; the Wilson tendency does, and it doesn't take much to get on their enemies list.
You won't find many enemies of contemporary art who call Damien Hirst a genius - as I did in the very piece to which Wilson objects. But writing, as Philip Roth has so beautifully demonstrated through a life of literary transgression, is a dubious moral act. Writers are irresponsible people. I wish, sometimes, that I could write in a manner Mr Wilson would respect. I could have filled my piece on the Turner Prize with knowledgeable remarks such as the observation that struck me looking at Steve McQueen's Deadpan, in the Turner show, that the way it sets up a physical problem and studies it resembles Richard Serra's films.
But whenever I think of putting something like this in an article, I picture people like Simon Wilson reading it and acknowledging - ah yes, he is one of us, after all. He does display a knowledge of contemporary art. And the devil in me makes me strike out that sentence. Some people's respect is not worth having.
