The Stage

Chit Chat - Conditioning in modern art

Published Tuesday 23 June 2009 at 13:00

The Tory’s shadow arts team has done rather a good job at ingratiating itself to the cultural sector over the last year or so. Indeed, its charm offensive has been never more apparent than in the last month, when Conservative minister for culture Ed Vaizey has been seen one day cropping up at a National Campaign for the Arts conference and another in a feature interview for The Grauniad, of all places.

Still, it would appear there is a chink in his armour. Modern art.

Speaking at the aforementioned NCA conference, he recalled a time when he visited the old Saatchi Gallery with his mother, the art critic Marina Vaizey, and persuaded her to “look at the catalogue to see if she could identify the artist who had made the air conditioning units”.

The moral of the story, Vaizey concluded, was that “you’ve got to be quite cautious going round a contemporary art exhibition”.

The (perhaps unintended) implication that Tabard draws from the story was that the air conditioning units were the best things in there.