Not long before the change of Government in Britain in 1997, the then Heritage Secretary, Virginia Bottomley, made a speech in which she praised British contemporary art, describing it as the most exciting and innovatory in the world. Unexciting as it seemed, her observation was profoundly innovatory, indeed in its small way historic. To my knowledge no British Cabinet Minister, still less a Conservative, has ever given an official seal of approval to what is conventionally regarded as avant-garde art. The Labour Government has echoed its predecessor's praise at a higher volume, as if determined to out-do it. The sanctification by the state of works of contemporary art has now become part of the discourse of officialdom.

At this stage I am not concerned with the aesthetic qualities of the works in question. Whether our contemporary art deserves the prestige and official approval it enjoys, or whether it represents to a large extent the incoherent ramblings of modernism in a state of advanced senescence, has no bearing on the point. That point is that the state through its Ministers has begun to confer unqualified praise on works of art that are habitually referred to by critics as, at the very least, ‘disturbing’. It is not possible for Ministers to praise contemporary British art while excluding the best known work of its most acclaimed practitioners. In saying what she did Mrs Bottomley was pronouncing herself excited by the spectacle of sections of animals pickled in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst, by the concrete cast of a desolate house by Rachel Whiteread, and by the private parts of Gilbert and George.