Eminently Unqualified

Tracy Emin was just appointed to London's prestigious Royal academy as professor of drawing.

Emin, who recently contributed the most risible etchings for a series entitled "Love is what you want", is to be the shaper of young, impressionable minds, the yardstick (or charcoal stick) for every budding young da Vinci or Blake-a former pupil of the college.

Of course, like Art sales, it's all about the name-I daresay attendance at the Royal academy shall be healthy this coming semester, and the school has already trotted out the usual suspects to defend the decision. "There will be a lot of people who say, 'What a lousy idea, she doesn't stand for classical drawing'..." said Tate director Nick Serota, before steadfastly back tracking with the rebuttal that he thinks it's a "great appointment."

Serota of course is said to be a fierce advocate conceptual art over figurative painting, and allegedly had some pretty dodgy dealings with NACF (Art fund) over the acquisition of works by Emin, Hirst, et al, calling for demands he be sacked by artist Stuart Pearson Wright and the Stuckist group, but we'll come to Serota in a future article.

Perhaps it's uncharitable to disqualify Tracy on the basis of her complete level of apparent skill, the aging Picasso upon seeing his sons doodles, was said to have turned forlorn to the young Paulo, and told him he had spent his whole life trying to master such innocence.
Of course, Picasso could draw.

Is it me or are there sinister undertones in the relegation of what used to be 'natural talent', fighting for elbow room with incompetent scrawl?

If naive renderings can said to be artistically viable then talent no longer carries any currency, draftsmanship is outmoded, and sadly,what you end up with is art diminished to a child's scrawl, what I call the continual aspiration of nothing, the elevation of ignorance.

The artistic equivalent of Snookie.