even more useless than we could possibly imagine.

A gloriously heartwarming cover story at the Scottish Daily Record today.

Turns out scotland (nay Britain's) most untalented hack of an 'artist', jack Vettriano is in fact not even worth that title, being as he is nothing more than a preening self-engrandising colour-inner.

The Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual, more commonly used by graphic designers, was published in the same year [as Vettriano began painting].

The handbook is filled with photos posed by models which can then be traced or copied.

It cost £16.99 back in 1987 and was republished twice, but is now out of print and can only be bought second-hand.

The figures it features bear a striking resemblance to those in Vettriano paintings, sometimes appearing only to have been slightly adapted, for example with the clothes changed.

I loathe Jack Vettriano. I loathe that artists (from a variety of backgrounds) who are trying (and I will admit on a great number of occasions failing) to challenge themselves, to find new modes of thinking and new aesthetic means of expression, are dismissed by the media and the public as pretentious or pompous while this showy tosser fills in the spaces in some paint-by-numbers graphic design textbook and while drowning in money and attention has the audacity to claim that his lack of critical respect is down to 'jealousy'.

It's not the fame Jack, or the money. It's the shitness. Pure and simple. And in maskarading as 'art' your brand of bubble-gum starbucks wank is nothing but damaging. People fill their walls with your execrable outpourings because they are comfortably, bourgeois reassurances that art is nothing but pretty pictures. That it is candyfloss. That it is Coldplay.

The same cunts dismiss a true genius like Howard Barker for the same reasons.
I'll let him finish this post for me.

And she listened to everything Understanding some things
But not others
Laughing rarely, and always without knowing why
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again said

If that's art I think it is hard work
It was beyond me
So much of it beyond my actual life

But something troubled her
Something gnawed her peace
And she came a second time, armoured with friends

Sit still, she said...

And in the light again said

That is art, it is hard work

And one friend said, too hard for me
And other said if you will
I will come again

Because I found it hard I felt honoured

(Barker, prelude to The Bite of The Night)