Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 237

Tracey Emin: confessions of a conservative artist with nothing to say

The former wild child of Young British Art has turned into a stale British music hall act, as her recent Time Out interview reveals

There is a certain kind of British creative figure who turns, by the age of 45, into a walking caricature of the "artistic" individual. It happened to Ken Russell. It happened to Maggi Hambling. And boy, has it happened to Tracey Emin.

Any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature. An interview in the latest issue of Time Out reads like a cut-and-paste summary of previous public statements: Emin's views on life boiled down to bullet points:

• She is oppressed as a woman artist.
• She is happy to be childless.
• She is proud that she voted Conservative.
And so forth.

We've had high art lite, the term applied by critic Julian Stallabrass to the Young British Artist (YBA) movement in which Emin rose to fame. Now here is feminist art lite. Emin tells Time Out how prices for Louise Bourgeois are lower than prices for comparable male artists. It's a glib reduction of feminist art to just see it in these obviously self-interested terms of price.

In her day, Tracey Emin was a lot more personal and surprising than this. Her self-portrayal was exhausting but it achieved an epic quality through sheer detail. Nowadays she sounds less authentic and less intimate in public statements, as if she no longer has all that much she desperately needs to say.

This is also true of her art. She enthuses to Time Out about her "crazy sex paintings with mountains in the background". But Emin's sex paintings are hackneyed imitations of Schiele. They are so lacking in the confessional energy of her best work. It's true she can draw. But she can't paint. Most of all, however, she has become a cliche – everyone in the country knows all there is to know about her. The celebrity has replaced the artist.

That is, like I say, an old British tradition. It's telling that Emin admires David Cameron, for his kind of conservatism mirrors her kind of radicalism. Real subversives want to change art and the world. Emin does not want to change her own art because she long ago found a winning formula. As for changing society, there has always been more profit, for some British creatives, in playing the part of the avant-garde provocateur to an essentially conservative and timid public. Emin is turning into just such a stale British music hall act.

The dust has settled on Young British Art. Some became rich. Some were forgotten. One or two proved to be real artists. And some became end-of-the-pier entertainers.

Tracey EminArtJonathan Jones
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Why bringing the world's most sensual paintings to life kills them

A new film animates classic artworks by Caravaggio and others to try and shake them out of passivity. But isn't that where their power lies?

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What does it take to get a 21st-century audience excited about oil paintings? Well, they are all a bit … still, aren't they? Walking through an art museum, you pass so many landscapes and portraits that sit there in unmoving passivity.

But what if they moved? Rino Stefano Tagliafierro's film Beauty begins with slides of 19th-century landscape paintings. Then a couple of birds fly over a painted lake. Uh-huh. From there, we are taken on a rollercoaster ride through pre-20th century European art, from Bouguereau's waxy nudes – animated so that they actually cavort – to Caspar David Friedrich's desolate winter vision of a ruined abbey whose sun, in this version, eventually sets.

Since the theme is beauty, we see some of the most sensual paintings in the world start to move uncannily. Titian's Venus of Urbino gracefully turns her head. Correggio's Jupiter, disguised as a blue cloud, moves his misty paw up and down on Io's pale back.

Meanwhile, Caravaggio's Judith – painted in a moment of eerie stillness in the act of beheading Holofernes – finishes the job and severs the head.

It's not the first time animators have taken on art, but usually it has been done for laughs. Terry Gilliam's cartoons for Monty Python made surreal, hilarious use of the classics – the foot that comes down in the Monty Python title sequence is from a Bronzino painting in the National Gallery.

Before animation, caricaturists were already travestying high art. William Hogarth fills his paintings with profane classical allusions.

What's freaky about this film is that, unlike earlier such appropriations of fine art, it is not a joke – it is a meditation on beauty with not a belly laugh in sight. Or at least not an intentional one.

It makes for a strange and striking hymn to culture. All art worth its salt begs to be remade and reinterpreted – from Shakespeare to the Three Musketeers. Filmmakers have restaged Caravaggio's paintings with actors playing his models. Why not animate them and see what happens when Judith finishes her bloody work?

It's only putting on screen what our imaginations do when we look at powerful works of art. We are all film directors or novelists in our heads, imagining worlds inside the paintings, telling ourselves the stories incited by the pictures. Beauty makes those imaginative encounters luridly visible.

Yet in the end, the stillness of paintings is not a lack or a failure – it is not something we have to digitally put right. The power of Caravaggio lies in his creation of moments of intense drama that are suspended forever – the dynamism and danger is all the greater for being arrested in a fraction of time.

It is entertaining to see Judith actually chop off Holofernes's head, but it misses the whole point of Caravaggio, who makes us contemplate one moment of moral choice for all eternity. What a hard thing it is to kill a man, you think in front of the painting. Oh, it's quite easy, you think while watching the animated version.

PaintingArtMonty PythonMichelangelo Merisi da CaravaggioWilliam HogarthAnimationJonathan Jones
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Parliamentary fighting is a global bloodsport | Jonathan Jones

The passions at work in this picture from Ukraine's parliament are all too real and all too dangerous

Overweight men, mostly in suits and ties, heave at one another, like a beach of maddened seals. They push and punch and jostle in a densely packed scrum, their bodies crammed between fixed wooden benches. This picture captures the moment a brawl broke out in Ukraine's parliament. It is a dynamic image of one of the world's strangest bloodsports: parliamentary fighting.

Scenes like this are surprisingly common inside legislative assemblies around the world. There was a previous bust-up in the Ukrainian parliament just 10 months ago. Georgia also saw a parliamentary fight recently, while chaotic scenes have been known to erupt in the parliaments of Taiwan, Somalia, Bolivia, Argentina and Nigeria. One of the biggest parliamentary fights, in India, looks on YouTube like a full-scale riot inside the national assembly, with members hurling microphones as non-participants flee the chamber.

Aficionados of muscular politics enjoy these fights. They even collect images of them online. After the Labour MP Eric Joyce brawled in a bar at the House of Commons, political bloggers rated the best political fistfights.

Does fighting disgrace an electoral assembly, or does it prove that politicians care about their beliefs? The picture from Ukraine's heated debating chamber communicates passion and intensity. These men appear to be fighting for their lives, not just a point of order. The anger they express with their bodies is – in a picture – more attractive than a moribund assembly where half-awake MPs debate a bill no one cares about.

Might the occasional fist fight restore people's engagement with parliamentary politics in Britain? It is true the House of Commons is notoriously adversarial. Its critics are alienated by the rutting rivalry of leaders locked in ritual verbal conflict at prime minister's question time. But surely the problem is not the display of antipathy - it is the phoney feel of it all, as opposing parties score points like public school debaters.

At least in the Ukraine they really mean it. No one in the scenes of this week's fight is striking a pose. Subsequent photographs of the episode show a man with real blood on his face. The point scoring exchanges of words that echo in the House of Commons all too often seem bloodless.

Sometimes physical violence is – surely – the honest answer to weasel words. After the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972 the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, supported the British paratroopers' version of events in the House of Commons. Bernadette Devlin MP was not called by the Speaker, so she went up to Maudling and hit him.

Yet for all the appeal of a parliamentary fight club that answers false rhetoric with spontaneous aggression (we now know Maudling was supporting an untrue version of events), it is of course a slippery slope to civil disaster. Parliaments exist to resolve disputes without violence. Their whole function is to replace fighting with words – and if the rhetoric rings hollow it needs to be infused with greater truth. A punch is not true eloquence, even if Devlin's came close.

The passions at work in this picture from Ukraine's parliament are all too real and all too dangerous. As the pro-Russia policies of president Viktor Yanukovych push the opposition ever further into dissent, this fight broke out in a budget debate that was ended with a show of hands rather than the usual electronic vote: in the same session a measure was passed to criminalise activities related to public protest. In reality, fighting in parliament is quite likely to be a danger signal of a society splitting apart.

This is apparent from one of the bloodiest fights ever seen in an electoral chamber, which took place in America in the 1850s. In 1856, Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane in the Senate. Sumner's offence was to criticise Brooks for supporting slavery. This fight was a sign of things to come. Within a few years Americans would be killing Americans.

Ukraine's parliamentarians take note: a house divided against itself cannot stand.

UkraineEuropeEric JoyceHouse of CommonsBloody SundayNorthern IrelandViktor YanukovychNews photographyJonathan Jones
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David Shrigley, Donna Tartt and Kate Moss – the week in art

Shrigley sells off his teeth as Tartt has crowds flocking to an art show. Plus, why no artist can capture the supermodel's power – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Giorgio de Chirico
I am a little reluctant to recommend an exhibition at this north London gallery of modern Italian art. All too often, it presents lesser and later works by famous names, and this show is no exception, with a stress on later reworkings of old ideas by an artist who did his best paintings before the first world war. But what the hell. Giorgio de Chirico is such a titan in the story of modern art that even his slightest creations are worth seeking out. His self-cannibalism later in his career, turning his eerie mythic images into kitsch repetition, is itself strangely fascinating. De Chirico at his greatest portrays a long afternoon world of railway station loneliness where classical statues loom terrifyingly. He is bizarre and magnificent.
• Estorick Collection, London N1 until 19 April

Other exhibitions this week

Ellsworth Kelly
Release your soul for the new year with a selection of prints in pure bright colours from this American dreamer's personal collection of his work.
• Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh EH8 until 22 February

Stephen Willats
A survey of cybernetics-influenced works created in the 1960s by this pioneer of British conceptual art.
• Raven Row, London E1 from 23 January until 30 March

Patrick Caulfield
The master of melancholic ordinariness brings his louche vision to the Lakes.
• Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal LA9 from 17 January until 29 March

Soviet Silent Film Posters
The film poster, like the film, was an arena for artistic experiment in the early days of the Soviet Union. To the Winter Palace!
• GRAD, London W1W from 17 January until 29 March

Masterpiece of the week

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time, ca 1634-1636
The moral sensibility of Poussin gives classical beauty profound power in what may be his greatest painting. If they stop dancing will the world end? Or does time continue when we all depart?

• Wallace Collection, London W1U

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

Why no artist has ever got Kate Moss right

That David Shrigley is flogging his gnashers for £1,200 a pop

That William Burroughs, David Lynch and Andy Warhol are secret photographers

Who the 10 most subversive female artists in history are

That an artist has made all our superheroes – from the X-Men to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – walk like Egyptians

That crowds are flocking to a Dutch old masters show because of Donna Tartt

How to get more black men into galleries

Why the British Museum is the world's Open University

And finally …

Follow us on Twitter

Get active – share your art on the theme of movement now!

David ShrigleyDonna TarttKate MossArtJonathan Jones
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Why artists just don't get Kate Moss

She's been depicted in plastic by Allen Jones, tattooed by Lucian Freud and snapped by the world's greatest photographers. But as Moss turns 40, she's a beauty still waiting for her Picasso

Kate Moss creates a timeless bubble around herself where feminism never happened. In this archaic realm, women are bodies and men are eyes. This has proved a lot of fun for male artists, who can make the kind of art about Moss that in any other context would be dismissed as 1960s-style misogyny.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider how she has revived the career of Allen Jones. In the 1960s, Jones made fetishistic pop art that fantasised freely about sex. His sculptures even turned women into pieces of furniture. One of these works in the Tate was attacked in what is thought to have been a feminist protest.

But Allen Jones is hot again – thanks to Kate Moss. In a sale at Christies that celebrated her as a "muse", his images, including a Goldfinger-like photographic work and a plastic model, were the most publicised and high-selling works (at £32,500 and £133,875, respectively).

A beauty that can redeem Jones is not to be sniffed at. And, of course, Moss has also "inspired" Gary Hume to portray her with an empty silver face, Marc Quinn to depict her doing yoga, looking like some mythological goddess, and Lucian Freud to paint her as a reclining nude when she was pregnant.

Yet I don't buy into the idea that Moss is a great "muse", a word I don't understand or like. "Muse" is a stale Victorian concept that sentimentalises the messy realities of desire and art.

There's another problem: Moss doesn't live in a great age for beauty in art. I think she may know this. Her relationships with artists are actually quite tantalising. Jones, Quinn and a legion of fashion photographers have been allowed to capture her image, and yet an image is all they have taken away – you get sense that the real Kate Moss has eluded them. Their excitement is so obvious, so puppyish. The chance to put heterosexual excitement into contemporary art is so rare that they just shoot their aesthetic load with a splat.

Moss apparently wanted something more, for she embarked on a potentially far more serious encounter with the one artist up to the job. Titian and Picasso were not around to paint her, but Lucian Freud was. Their relationship was intimate enough for him not only to paint her nude but also, as she has revealed, to tattoo her body. Using skills he learned in the merchant navy in the second world war, the great painter turned amateur tattoo artist gave her an image of two tiny birds on her lower back. That's what I call body art.

If Freud had met Moss 10 years earlier and portrayed her over and over again, if the intimacy that tattoo betokens became a complex passion between painter and model, then we could really say she inspired great art. As it is, Kate Moss is the muse who has never found the right artist. Where's a sexist voyeuristic genius when you need one?

Kate MossLucian FreudPaintingArtPhotographyMarc QuinnGary HumeJonathan Jones
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Would you pay £1,200 for one of David Shrigley's teeth?

The subversive artist may be grinning all the way to the bank as UK editions of his incisive sculpture, Brass Tooth, go up for sale

David Shrigley must have had a big, toothy grin when he created multiple editions of his sculpture Brass Tooth, which goes on sale for £1,200 a pop at the London art fair this week. It is a cast of a single tooth – including the roots – and is typical of Shrigley's sly, subversive, humorous art in how it brings a modern art cliche crashing down to Earth.

Enigmatic, upsetting, erotic or shocking uses of the human body to make art are a well-worn convention by now. It was suggestive in the 1950s for Marcel Duchamp to make a lascivious but mysterious set of small sculptures (sold, like Shrigley's tooth, in multiple editions) with titles like Female Fig Leaf and Wedge of Chastity. These organic-looking objects appear to be cast from real body parts – or is that a tease? It was still a new and provocative gesture when, in 1978, Andy Warhol urinated on canvases prepared with metallic paint to create oddly poetic oxidation effects – museums call the results Oxidation Paintings but they are popularly known as Piss Paintings.

After Warhol came the deluge – and, yes, it included urine. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ makes a more portentous age of carnality in art. Jesus! It's Jesus in a tank of piss! "Andre, urine all the papers," his art dealer said. Not to be outdone, Britain's Marc Quinn froze an impressive quantity of his own blood to create a self-portrait that has become a respectable treasure of the National Portrait Gallery. All over the place in the 1980s and 90s, artists made meat dresses and movies of their innards.

That heavy-breathing investigation of fluids and orifices now appears a bit pretentious, and Shrigley's tooth is a deadpan mockery of this modern tradition. His sensibility is closer to some 18th-century caricature of a toothpuller's shop than the metaphysical aspirations of Quinn's bloody head. Brass Tooth, sold in the UK for the first time, is a body part without portent: everyone has teeth and gets toothaches. It's not a memento mori. Indeed, its ultimate target is, perhaps, Damien Hirst's diamond skull, which the artist claimed to be one. Shrigley speculates that his sculpture may be of interest to dentists. (Perhaps Brass Tooth could decorate a waiting room.) It certainly won't make anyone think about death – and that's a plus.

David ShrigleySculptureArtLondonJonathan Jones
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The British Museum at 255: a Google doodle for the world's open university | Jonathan Jones

Innovative, questioning and controversial, the British Museum – subject of a 255th anniversary Google doodle tribute – is on a firmly upward trajectory under director Neil MacGregor

Just what is it that makes the British Museum so different, so appealing? Behind a grand neo-classical portico in central London, you will find one of the most innovative museums of the 21st century. The museum is celebrating its 255th anniversary with record visitor numbers and a Google doodle. Why does it keep going from strength to strength?

It is, of course, down to the vision of Neil MacGregor, who took over as director in 2002. MacGregor has emerged as a great impressario of art and history in the mould of Kenneth Clark, the brilliant popular intellectual whose 20th-century career encompassed running the National Gallery and creating the television series Civilisation. Similarly, MacGregor has presented and written a popular world history based on objects in the British Museum, while shaping its exhibitions and events to deliver a provocative, intelligent argument about global culture.

In 2002, the British Museum seemed dusty and directionless. MacGregor has changed all that by presenting it as a meeting place of world cultures, where western perspectives are radically questioned. An exhibition on the Persian empire seemed to question ancient Greece itself, going against the oldest European prejudice. More recently, an exhibition about the Hajj was accused by some of flattering the Saudi government.

Such controversies can only help the museum. Its genuinely multicultural attitude has tranformed its global appeal. Hajj was a hit.

It turns out that even in a pop culture-obsessed age, history and archaeology retain an enduring fascination when presented with a contemporary edge and a sense of spectacle.

Shows at the British Museum are theatrical, sensational and have strong narratives – as well as being unfailingly serious. The current Beyond El Dorado exhibition is a case in point, illuminating anthropology through legend. More quietly, but perhaps even more importantly in the long run, the permanent displays are constantly, bit by bit, being renovated and reimagined. The British Museum's staggering collections are ultimately what draw so many visitors from around the world – and the presentation of those collections is improving all the time.

It's hard to find an empty gallery in this museum. I know, because I am researching an art history book. It's awe-inspiring – if a bit frustrating, when you need to concentrate – to find such apparently recerche rooms as the gallery of pre-classical Greek pottery constantly crowded with people of all ages.

The opening of a new exhibition complex this year can only add to the energy and excitement. The British Museum is the whole world's open university. Long may it enlighten us.

Google doodleMuseumsArtInternetSearch enginesGoogleJonathan Jones
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Donna Tartt v art: why crowds are really flocking to see a Goldfinch

Tartt's bestseller about Fabritius's Goldfinch has drawn huge crowds to a New York show. But shouldn't great art trump passing fads?

By a surreal coincidence, the Frick Collection in New York opened an exhibition of 17th-century Dutch art last year, whose exhibits include The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, on the very day Donna Tartt published her novel The Goldfinch, which features the Fabritius painting.

Great news for the Frick, which apparently credits Tartt's fiction with drawing crowds to the show. The Goldfinch has had almost as many people crowding around it as Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, which of course features in The Girl with a Pearl Earring.

But wait. I am not convinced that people flock to see these two paintings just because they are in bestsellers. There could be another reason.

Carel Fabritius is a lost genius. He was killed in a massive gunpowder explosion that wrecked 17th-century Delft, but from his remaining works he promised to match Vermeer and Rembrandt. His Goldfinch is one of the paintings that puts him in the company of the greatest painters ever. It anticipates 19th-century French art with its unpretentious attention to the beauty of everyday life.

And Vermeer's painting of an unknown young woman is quite compelling, too.

When it comes to great art, we are always in danger of overestimating not just our own response (it doesn't really matter if you don't "get" the Mona Lisa or David; I'd keep it to yourself) but the passing masquerade of contemporary culture. Do you really think Leonardo da Vinci needed Dan Brown to popularise his art? It was the other way round – Brown exploited Leonardo's good name to give The Da Vinci Code spurious appeal. Trash comes and goes, but great art endures.

So perhaps those people staring at a goldfinch are not twitching to the tune of cultural fashion. Perhaps – just perhaps – they are transfixed by the silent authority of a majestic painting.

ArtJohannes VermeerDonna TarttJonathan Jones
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X-Men walk like Egyptians in super Hero-glyphics comic strip

Artist Josh Lane's Hero-glyphics takes a sideways look at Marvel's modern superheroes

• Myths and Marvel: Hero-glyphics gallery

Superheroes are shards of broken myth. In a rational scientific world that has left behind the gods and monsters that once peopled legends and sustained religions, the last supernatural beings to openly walk our world are costumed crime fighters with amazing powers.

It is therefore only natural for superheroes to return to the ancient world whose myths and magic they embody in a new form. In Josh Lane's Hero-glyphics, costumed crusaders – from X Men to Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles – appear on Egyptian papyri in place of Osiris and Anubis. To complicate things, they include Thor, a superhero based on a Viking god. This adds to the sense that Lane's ancient Egyptian comic strips are exercises in comparative mythology.

He applies the conventions of ancient Egyptian art to his portrayal of modern heroes. Captain America and other Marvellous beings pose with feet side-on, torsos turned to face the onlooker and heads in profile. This is the ancient Egyptian way of depicting figures that was already established when the Narmer Palette, one of the earliest masterpieces of Egyptian art, was created in about 3100 BC.

This sideways manner of depicting people and gods was still used when Egypt came under Roman influence over 3,000 years later. Why did ancient Egypt never change its artistic style (apart from in the reign of a single dissident pharaoh)? Why did Egyptian artists not experiment with more fully-rounded pictures of people? They probably did, in their workshops – the brief subversive Armana period with its elongated portraits shows how they could go wild given the chance. But the Egyptians clearly wanted the same thing over and over again from their art. It was a representation of ancient beliefs, an image of eternal truths. Why fix what ain't broke?

The same goes for superheroes, of course. These hero-glyphs are funny because superheroes are so recognisable. Invented by 20th-century comics and present today everywhere from blockbuster films to Lego, superheroes can be daringly reinterpreted but their basic visual appearances are set. Batman can suffer but he can't stop dressing as a bat.

The ancient Egyptians, who believed in gods with the heads of lions and jackals, could relate to that. But how fast can a superhero move with sideways feet flattened out in space?

ArtMarvelComics and graphic novelsJonathan Jones
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The MP portraits 'scandal' shows how irrational Britain's hatred has become | Jonathan Jones

£250,000 since 1995 to record a chapter in political history seems reasonable to me, but the public feels utterly alienated from the political class

Tony Benn sits in a carved medieval-style wooden chair that once belonged to the pioneering socialist MP Keir Hardie. This is just one of the symbolic objects that surround him, as selected by Benn himself, in a portrait painted in 1998 by Andrew Tift for the parliamentary art collection. There's a vial of Benn's blood in the painting, just to show that it is red and not blue: it alludes to the fact that in 1963, Benn renounced a hereditary peerage so he could run for election to the House of Commons.

By 1964 he was postmaster general in Harold Wilson's first government, yet he was to move further and further to the left while serving in Wilson's cabinets. Another object in the painting shows exactly how far left, for on the shelf behind him sits a bust of Karl Marx. He plants himself in that chair chewing his trademark pipe and wearing, of course, a red tie, with his head among the Marxists but his rump firmly in the democratic tradition.

A likable visual record of one of the most striking lives in modern political history, you may think. But no. According to just about every news outlet this is part of a collection of "vanity portraits" paid for by taxpayers' money at the whim of a cross-party committee of MPs – and the latest scandal to alienate the public from Britain's political class.

Nothing reveals the current sickness of British democracy quite so acutely as this universal condemnation of a respectable art collection. I can think of art expenditures by parliament that might be genuinely scandalous. If MPs spent a million quid on a gold statue of Kate Moss by Marc Quinn to decorate the House of Commons tea room, I'd be shocked. If they gave Damien Hirst 5 million to cover Big Ben with dots, that would seem excessive. But is it actually at all extravagant that – over a period going back to the 1990s – a total of £250,000 has been spent on not one work, but an entire collection of portraits that add up to a serious visual record of the outstanding MPs of our time?

All the MPs chosen for this honour are memorable for their achievements or their personality and public voice, from Diane Abbott to Ken Clarke. When I saw these portraits recently at Portcullis House, I was impressed that MPs had the imagination to create such a sustained archive of modern history. Only a nation that utterly loathes its own elected representatives, and by implication its entire system of government, could find something to attack in this serious collection, that puts Abbott's face into history alongside the portraits and statues of her white male Victorian parliamentary predecessors. Painted portraits still flourish as a way of honouring someone and acknowledging their place in history. The National Portrait Gallery adds to its collection all the time – why not complain about its regular royal commissions, which come from public funds just as surely as anything parliament commissions?

I have not filed a freedom of information request on this but I am pretty damn sure it costs a lot more than £250,000 every year to maintain that architectural behemoth, the Palace of Westminster. This old gothic folly must cost endless millions to constantly restore, and what about the heat and lighting? On the logic of the TaxPayers' Alliance, which finds it so disgusting that some high-achieving MPs are commemorated by portraits, we should sell it off. Let MPs meet in an underground car park.

But I am wasting my breath – apparently we British really do hate our MPs that much. The portraits "scandal" shows how irrational this hatred has become. This is a democracy. To hate our elected representatives is to hate ourselves – isn't that obvious? Parliament has seen some genuine scandals in recent times, but it also has a massively honourable history. A civil war was fought to establish that kings must listen to it. Winston Churchill spoke in it. Just last year, a project to bomb Syria was defeated by it. Surely, the fact that MPs foiled the military ambitions not just of David Cameron but also of the US in Syria ought to give pause to those who preach empty nihilism about the British democratic process.

Those who dismiss MPs as nothing but corrupt charlatans are in serious danger of rejecting democracy itself, which has never existed in some platonic ideal form but always, everywhere, in the kind of flawed human fabric of which the House of Commons is so richly made up. Painted portraits of living MPs are a decent and reasonable way to document the latest chapters in this ancient institution's long story. Tony Benn, and yes, Diane Abbott, Ken Clarke and Tony Blair, have all earned a place in the history of British democracy – and they deserve their portraits.

ArtHouse of CommonsJonathan Jones
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