A Little Art Education by Lynn Barber review

Star interviewer, provoker of the Chapman brothers and the woman who made Howard Hodgkin cry… Barber’s slim book about her obsession with artists – particularly those who smoke – is wonderfully entertaining

Ernest Hemingway, who knew a lot of artists, said the essential gift for a writer was a bullshit detector, and Lynn Barber’s crackles and wows like a Geiger counter during her adventures in the art world. The author of An Education, which was made into a film starring Carey Mulligan, Barber is also Fleet Street’s deadeye interviewer, who has drawn a bead on painters from Salvador Dalí to Sir David Hockney and Tracey Emin. Of her encounters with the young British artists or YBAs, she says: “The last thing on Earth I wanted to hear was their theory of art or the sort of bollocks they put in art catalogues.” When she was a judge of the Turner prize in 2006, Barber praised one shortlisted finalist as a “beautiful colourist”, only to discover that this was a pant-wetting solecism as far as her fellow jurists were concerned: “beautiful is a despised word in artspeak”, she adds in mock self-reproach. Her relations with the Chapman brothers were strained after Barber dared to ask if there was a connection between the genetic mutations in their artworks and Dinos Chapman’s own “deformed” hands (he had arthritis). The brothers called her fascist, bourgeois and stupid. She eventually made up with Dinos’s brother, Jake, and reveals that he is planning to row the Atlantic. “I warmly hope he survives,” she says, making this pleasantry sound bracingly wintry.

With so much about the art scene likely to press Barber’s anti-BS buttons, you may wonder why she bothers to write about it at all. The answer is that she’s passionately fond of art and certain artists, as much as she is passionately unfond of others. “I hugely admire artists for their willingness to take risks and trust their whole future to their own creativity,” she says. “They have this consuming passion that will last them all their lives.” Not only that, but they throw the best parties.