The Wynne Prize competition demands a statement from each artist explaining their entry but this year Tim Storrier's statement was basically 'my painting tells its own story', which knocked everyone else's guff into a cocked hat.

So you don't like modern art, Mr Sellick.

While that doesn't surprise me in the least, nor should you be ashamed of taking such a reactionary stance. My own father took a similar position on the music of the sixties - you could even hear the inverted commas he would put around the word "music".

He did not however try to paper over his visceral objection to, say, the Yardbirds, by suggesting that it was because Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page had forsaken Jesus.

But I do believe you do Mr Hughes an injustice.

"Who is going to proclaim that the emperor has no clothes now that Robert Hughes is dead?"

Errrmmm... our august art critic had this to say when confronted by surrealism.

"I thought, God, that can't be art! Can it be art? Well maybe it is! You know... and gradually your eye gets hooked by an image and then you pursue it..."

As represented here:

http://www.youthink.com/quiz_images/full_902203777.jpg

Art is not quantifiable in the manner that you would like it to be, Mr Sellick. Some like some stuff, others like other stuff. There's even a non-ironic school of thought that the Green Lady is kinda neat.

http://starstruckworld.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/chinese-girlrobin.jpg

Go figure.

I think I would like your father Pericles. Pity he got his decades wrong. It was the "music" of the 80s that he should have been talking about, the 60s music was OK, if not as good as the 50s.

I must admit I have seen very little recent "art" that I would hang on my wall. Then when I occasionally catch the Antique Road Show, I also see a lot of older stuff, sometimes highly valued, that I think would be better used to feed the fire, than grace a wall.

Sellick wrote:” We are not calmed and enchanted by art that elicits the beautiful, even if that beauty is the strange beauty of the cross.”

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all too often the cross has represented intolerance, tyranny, oppression, and murder. It is a symbol of an apparatus of execution.

Since Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 and somewhat earlier it has on occasion been relentless in persecuting those people who have maintained their faith against Christian pressures or even questioned Christian doctrine. On many occasions Christians have even murdered them.

There have been notable martyrdoms of those who refused the Christian demand to convert. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia tells of Hypatia, mathematician, philosopher and scholar, who was murdered by Christian monks in 370. Some think her martyrdom marked the beginning of the Dark Ages. Doubters of Christian doctrine were also martyrs to Christian persecution. Michael Servetus, theologian, physician, cartographer and humanist, was executed in 1553 in Calvin's Geneva apparently for doubting the Trinity. Giordano Bruno, mathematician, philosopher and scholar, was executed in 1600 in Catholic Rome apparently for pantheism.

Jews have been often exhorted to become Christians. When they remained faithful to their religion their fate was often exile or martyrdom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_martyrs tells of some of the many Jewish martyrs who were murdered because they refused to deny their faith. Some were executed by Christians. Some were Christians who became Jews and were executed for apostasy. Such a one was Nicholas Antoine whose fate is described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Antoine.

Spreading the Gospel is an imperative in Christianity. However, acceptance of the Gospel means denial of one's previous beliefs. Some have become Christians of their own free will, and that is fine. However, many have done so to save their lives. Other have died as martyrs when they were unwilling to abandon their own deeply held beliefs. I regard the Holocaust as the culmination of the Christian effort to deal with those pesky people who would not accept the Christian Gospel.

Contemporary Art is not boring, the lack of contemporary talent is what's boring.

All art, without exception, and regardless of the seeming content, even if it pretends to be religious (e.g. about "Jesus") is essentially a portrayal/description of the the ego of the person who produces it.

Borrowing from the title of the book by Herbert Marcuse we now "live" in a one-dimensional "culture". As such the normal dreadfully sane every-person is cut off from access to their deep psyche - the deep psyche being the well-spring from which creative artistic genius emerges.

Which is why most of visual art (in particular) is so boring.

What does the blood-soaked image of "Jesus" nailed to a cross tell us about Mel Gibson?