We can't deny you rose to the challenge. Magnificently. Terrifyingly. Our little blog the other day, casually inviting nominations for the Most Overrated Picture Ever, clearly struck some kind of nerve. A throbbing and sometimes sore one, admittedly, but a nerve nonetheless.
Lots of debate, plenty of argument and some undeniably robust views expressed. A few of our favourite cuts:
Stubbs. Find something else to paint.
Anything by Canaletto. The most boring artist ever. And I'll second the vote for Hockney. There's no there, there. It's a non-stop celebration of shallowness.
But what did our wee survey ("inane chatter ... insipid at best, insidious and ignorant at worst" according to Bob Crane) actually say?
A few leading candidates were jostling for space in your collective Room 101: Jack Vettriano, darling of keyrings and teatowels across the globe, was a favourite hate figure. Salvador Dalí was also mentioned several times. So too was David Hockney, whose surface dazzle some people felt was straying into Vettriano territory.
Some of you have stylistic quibbles: Hernan took objection to "any painting in which the faces of babies ... look like the faces of seven-year-old kids." Others disliked Jackson Pollock's drip-fed abstractions.
A few of you took a fairly oblique approach:
Worst painting? My kitchen, by a "professional" - what a mess.
Anything displayed in Tony Hart's The Gallery was always useless. I know they were done by children but really that's no excuse.
Britart cropped up frequently, with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marcus Harvey all singled out as barbecue material, despite the huge numbers who queued for Sensation and the Tate Modern.
Which raised a big question: are we really objecting not so much to individual works of art, more to the way certain images now wallpaper our lives? This was Madeleine:
The problem we now face is media hyper-saturation which relegates everything either to a product (you can own) or a soundbite supporting some nonsensical product/idea - ie The Scream used in advertising, and Monet and Van Gogh's images appropriated for every sensitive college student's dorm room.
Wise and sobering words, Madeleine; ones that the Today programme and the National Gallery, well into their own push for art to be labelled, primped and polled, might be interested to observe.
Any more for any more?
