Graham Ovenden’s art is controversial, but its destruction is a scandal

So, it isn’t only the hammer-wielding nutters of Isis who destroy ‘immoral art’. So do we, in supposedly civilised Britain. A judge’s order that the artworks of convicted child abuser Graham Ovenden be destroyed, on the basis that they do not reach our ‘standards of propriety’, is an act of medievalism to match any of the statue-smashing antics of the Islamic State in recent months.

At Hammersmith Magistrates Court, District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe advertised her philistinism for all to see. She said she was not concerned with the ‘historical importance or value’ of Ovenden’s works. ‘I am no judge of art or artistic merit, nor am I qualified to assess the historical age or value of some of the images,’ she said, unwittingly exposing the incredible folly, the borderline tyranny, of allowing one, subjective judge to decide the fate of decades-old works of art. She said she was judging the art merely on the basis of the ‘recognised standards of propriety which exist today’.