“Today marks the first day of National Art Hate Week. A seething critical mass that sprung, initially at least, from the hands of Billy Childish, prolific painter, poet, punk and self-proclaimed hero of the British art resistance movement. Childish was also Tracey Emin’s former lover and the founder – now ex-member – of Stuckism, a sizeable art movement best-known for protesting on the steps of Tate Modern to demand more contemporary figurative art; Childish left at the first hint of his idea manifesting itself into an actual, physical demonstration.
“It’s this concept of disorganised, ramshackle creativity that’s key to National Art Hate Week: “I was making a series of new posters and just liked the way the words ‘art’ and ‘hate’ fitted together,” Childish says, perhaps a mite disingenuously. The notion of turning the slogan into a national week apparently didn’t occur until Steve Lowe, “chief engineer” of the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop gallery, and Jimmy Cauty, former half of art pop agitators the KLF, collaboratively spurred him on. Lowe’s independent art space opened just a couple of months ago in London, set up as a “private ladies and gentlemen’s club for the disruptive betterment of culture”. And, aside from creating acid house pop smashes in What Time is Love and Justified and Ancient, Cauty famously set fire to £1m in cash in 1994, on a remote Scottish island with his KLF partner, Bill Drummond. Counter-cultural subversiveness seems ingrained in their psyches, and the three of them are well-positioned to unleash a manifesto declaring art war….”
