Small but powerful piece in the Scotsman this morning about a series of paintings by Gerald Laing, one of Scotland’s best known artists since the Pop Art heyday of the 60s, depicting the torture and cruelty by the Americans in the Abu Graib jail, was apparently rejected out of hand by Sir Nicolas Serota, director at the Tate.

Two reasons make this story important, the first is that after 30 years Laing returns to oil on canvas as his medium to convey this controversial message - and the second reason is the actual message contained in the art - that America has badly let down the civilised world with their evil, sadistic behaviour.

With terrorists blowing up innocent men, women and children on a daily basis, Bush and his cronies have given up the moral high ground and set the march of progress back a good 50 years. With such vile behaviour on both sides, when will the carnage end? Without a platform for artists to have their say, where is the focus for these important people to oppose the brutality?

I, for one, naively thought that after the German and Japanese atrocities in the second world war were exposed - and their perpetrators brought to justice, that the spectre of torture by a major democratic world power had come to an end. How wrong can a person be…

By ignoring the opportunity to view the pictures, Serota shows once again that he is not open to art outside the elitist circle of galleries, artists and their agents in which he holds sway, with its seedy rumours of corruption, rule bending and insider dealings.

These pictures should be seen - and the very person who has the power to achieve this appears to have his head in the sand. I quote - A spokeswoman for The Tate said: “An invitation was received to a private view of Laing’s work and Nicholas Serota did respond but unfortunately was not able to attend.”

One day the Serota bubble will burst.

Story here

The pictures here

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2006 at 12:55 pm and is filed under ArtWatch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.