Is this art? The Stuckists don’t think so.

A slovenly, unmade bed befouled with condoms and

tampons; a dead shark preserved in formaldehyde; human

excrement, fastidiously canned and packaged. Would you

call this art?

If the answer is a resounding no, you’re a Stuckist. You’re

stuck, outdated, fuddy-duddy and loving it. You crave the

good old days when a picture spoke a thousand words

and you could read everyone of them.

Painting was pronounced dead in the 1970s, sacrificed on

the altar of conceptualism, the art of ideas where even a butchered cow can belong in a

gallery.

Stuckists want to put painting back on its pedestal, they want to see brush strokes on

canvas and recognisable objects. Down, they say, with all the detached, “clever” stuff that

these days passes as art.

“You look at a Stuckist picture and you can see what it is,” says the Stuckist movement’s

co-founder, Charles Thomson, speaking from London, neatly resolving centuries of polemic

into a pithy definition of art. What you see is what you get. The Stuckists have devotees

around the world.

The movement was formed two years ago in reaction to the Brit-Art phenomenom

championed by British advertising tycoon and private collector Charles Saatchi, the man

behind the controversial Sensation exhibition, who famously paid £150,000 for a

soiled bed.

…Tracey Emin’s naughty rumpled bed, Damien Hirst’s

nasty dead shark and grisly cut-up cow, Chris Ofili’s profane painting of the Virgin Mary

decorated with elephant dung. In fact (and in frustration), it was Emin who gave the

Stuckists their name, denouncing her former lover, painter Billy Childish as “stuck, stuck,

stuck”.

Childish and Thomson embraced the insult, founded the Stuckists, posted a 20-point

manifesto on the web, and encouraged other painters around the world to take up the

cause.

They redubbed Brit-Art “Brit-Shit” and claimed 19th-century rebels such as Vincent Van Gogh

and Edvard Munch as honorary members. (Does Van Gogh’s suffering have no end?)

The Age