Everybody had one. If you grew up in Scotland in the mid 2000s, you had only to go round to your friend’s house and look above the dining room table, or somewhere in the hall by the coat hooks, or perhaps even glance at the magnets on the fridge, and there it was: a reproduction of Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler (1992).
For many people, Vettriano’s work marked one of their earliest exposures to this strange thing called art. It was certainly one of mine, just as it was also my first exposure to what is meant by “art criticism”. Criticism of Vettriano was as readily available as purchasing glossy reproductions of his work, which at one point were some of the highest-selling prints in the UK. My art teacher in high school despised him, in what was the only occasion I ever saw an otherwise soft-spoken man froth at the mouth: Vettriano was a poor craftsman. Vettriano plagiarised from technical drawing books. His art was ugly, and it was crass. And to top it all off, it wasn’t very good!
Now that a month has been and gone since Vettriano’s death at the age of 73—and the dust settled on the slew of polite obituaries that followed immediately afterwards—what’s worth reflecting on is how the ire levelled against him never really changed throughout the course of his life. There was always this hyperfocus on his lack of technical prowess, never far from the reminder that he was “self-taught”, as if this was a mark against him; always heavily implied was the idea that his strain of bland, unseasoned erotica was somehow deeply perverse. In every case there was a sense that the rules of critique were being subtly rewritten just so that Vettriano might be dismissed out of hand, and so that the genuinely thorny questions that arose from his work might be safely avoided: just what is the appeal of this kind of art, anyway? And what does that say about us and about the state of contemporary art generally? It’s always been easier to say it isn’t art at all than try to wade into a treacherous discussion that skirts dangerously close to classist snobbery.
My own opinion on Vettriano has softened somewhat over time. Did he make art? Of course he did. Is it any good? Of course it isn’t. It’s the kind of art that “speaks” to people in the same way as a canvas print of the Brooklyn Bridge, an appeal that equivocates the good old days with the Golden Age of Hollywood. This kind of placeless Americana, this artificially constructed nostalgia that holds a powerful grip in Scotland in particular, where the real world and real history are always determined to have gone on elsewhere. It’s no wonder that, when The Singing Butler sold for £744,800 in 2004, it became the most valuable artwork ever to be sold in Scotland as well as the highest sum ever earned by a living Scottish artist. It could only have happened here.
Yet, equally, it’s hard to say that Vettriano’s work is any worse than most of the bad art that continues to be made, sold and even appraised favourably today. It might even be the least bad art in the bad art canon, perhaps the best bad art there is going, in time likely to achieve the same kitschy iconic status as Vladimir Tretchikoff’s The Green Lady (1952) once its suburban ubiquity has faded for good.
There is also another, more political point to be made here. Vettriano, who grew up in severe poverty and did not heavily rely on a vast army of assistants to produce his work, perhaps lived a life more in tune with his artistic inspirations than many of his peers, who at some point often end up taking a more detached role to their work akin to the manager of a factory process. Yes, he had no qualms about his work being made into dime-a-dozen prints or put on magnets and mugs. But that only afforded him a more personal creative freedom. Yes, his art was bad. But one thing critics find hard to accept is that the existence of bad art is the price we pay for the possibility that anyone, anywhere, might be given the chance to live a creatively fulfilling life.
In both his life and work, Vettriano was simultaneously run of the mill and an exception to the rule. He was a hugely conventional artist who ended up rustling feathers anyway. And I’ll say it yet again: his art was bad. But if it had been any better, it might never have been good.
