“Paintings such as this one,” he said, indicating the Embden, “depict the land being raped, then slaughtered. And I don’t like to see the land I live in – or any other land for that matter – being raped and slaughtered! And I find it problematic that intelligent people can – simply because they haven’t examined a painting closely – advocate and endorse depictions of that rape and that slaughter – simply by claiming such pictures are “good”!

“The artist should have stuck a bulldozer in the centre of the picture – a huge, smoke-belching, oily, yellow machine tearing the heart out of the fucking soil with metal teeth, making it ready to be built on. That at least would have given the picture some trace of “realism”. I say that because that is what was once done to the land that may have served for this picture’s original model!

“But people wouldn’t like such a picture, would they? They would label it “ugly”. They don’t see the destruction that’s already taken place as anything ugly.” He paused. “No, that’s not true. They don’t even fucking see the destruction of the natural world that has taken place in order to make the land look like it does in that fucking picture. They shut their fucking eyes to that and simply see this mass of bleeding and screaming soil as a “natural” picture – a pretty one which they can hang on their walls in their living rooms – or is it “lounges” now? – and pretend such a “natural” view exists somewhere just beyond their brick and breezeblock house walls.

“And that’s the real function of paintings such as this one – the prime function. Art should be – as Picasso said – a weapon used in a war against mediocrity. Art is not to be hung on walls. And yet this watercolour is nothing more than a rose-tinted, naive pictorial representation of wilful destruction that’s already taken place – an ultra right-wing wet dream come true, given validity by an “artist” who wilfully and quite deliberately refuses to acknowledge that our materialistic, urban, mechanical, cannibalistic, industrial, micro-digital society has destroyed any original scenes of beauty from our lives forever and the only way we can pretend to recover them is by idolising such pretty little daubs as this one instead.

“And, as anyone knows, if you paint, present and exhibit such artificial scenes as this as “good” or as beautiful, then the viewers will eventually come to believe that such scenes are beautiful and that such places actually exist in abundance, thereby not protesting about the very real fact that actual scenes of real beauty are destroyed daily.”