Jake Chapman is right to criticise Ai Weiwei's drowned boy artwork

What was Ai Weiwei thinking? Posing as a dead refugee boy on a beach in Lesbos was risible, fatuous and grotesque

Artist Jake Chapman is not known for his sentimentalism. In their masterwork Hell, he and his brother Dinos showed no pity for thousands of toy soldiers they tortured and eviscerated in a landscape of baroque psychosis.

They have also collected and exhibited paintings attributed to Adolf Hitler, and in interviews, Jake Chapman goes out of his way to defy liberal soppiness with provocative remarks such as saying children should be banned from art galleries. Yet it turns out that, like the apparently heartless Andy Warhol who secretly worked in soup kitchens, Chapman has a penchant for modest acts of kindness. It has come to light that when he heard about Refugee Relief, a charity that works on Lesbos to save exhausted refugees from drowning, he bought them a lifeboat.

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