Andrew Marr slams art world as 'corrupted, pretentious and offensive'

Since suffering a stroke a decade ago, former BBC presenter Andrew Marr has relied on painting as a lifeline during his rehabilitation.

But the LBC broadcaster has now criticised the contemporary art world, branding it as 'corrupted, pretentious and offensive'.

The 65-year-old journalist, who was made a trustee of the National Gallery this year, claims a 'culture of greed' within the industry has ruined it for art lovers.

Marr, who presented his eponymous TV show on the BBC for 16 years until 2021, said that Frieze London, one of the world's biggest contemporary art fairs, had turned people off art. This year's edition of the fair opened last week.

Speaking at a private exhibition of his friend, landscape painter Adrian Hemming, in Primrose Hill last week, he said: 'The Frieze carbuncle is going on at the moment. Lots of absurd, ridiculous, badly dressed people air-kiss and prance around and convince themselves they are incredibly sophisticated.

'If anybody sells anything to anyone at Frieze, it's going to end up in a Swiss warehouse surrounded by barbed wire. The world of art is wonderful, but it has been corrupted by far too much money, greed and offensive language designed to keep normal people away.'

Each year, up to 60,000 people visit Regent's Park to attend Frieze London and its counterpart Frieze Masters, which features work spanning thousands of years. They were developed by the founders of art magazine Frieze, and the art can fetch millions of pounds.

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Marr added: 'A good picture is another piece of human communication, like a novel. It's put out into the world to touch people emotionally. It's not there as a storeroom [object of] value where someone has to worry about capital gains tax.

'Pick up almost any catalogue from a lot of big shows and you'll find a form of writing that is so obscure and so pretentious.

'It's "You're part of this tiny, little, hermetic art world" and if you're not one of us you're not wanted. There's too much interest in what's going to appreciate in value, and not enough interest in the artist.'

After Marr used painting to help him recover from his stroke in 2013, he and Hemming exhibited in Bermondsey, London, in 2017 under the title The Hemming & Marr Show.