6. The Singing Butler By Jack Vetriano
According to The Daily Telegraph Vetriano has been described as the “Jeffrey Archer of the art world”, a purveyor of “badly conceived soft porn”,and a painter of “dim erotica”. Sandy Moffat, head of drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art, said: “He can’t paint, he just colours in.” In 2013 in The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones wrote, “Vettriano fixes on fetishistic, stylish objects and paints them with a slick, empty panache” and “The world of Jack Vettriano is a crass male fantasy that might have come straight out of Money by Martin Amis” (But then Jonathan thinks that Tracey Emin can draw). On 21 April 2004, the original canvas of ‘The Singing Butler’ sold at auction for £744,500, after it had been rejected in 1992 by the Royal Academy summer exhibition. So it seems the crass male fantasy includes crass amounts of money too.