I take my kids to galleries to demonstrate my cultural superiority over the masses

Jake Chapman, one half of the YBA duo the Chapman Brothers, has been rude about taking children to art galleries. He told the Independent that ‘it’s as moronic as a child’ to expect a child to understand complex modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as ‘children are not human yet’. His forthright views have elicited a predictable response. Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund (who seems to be angry on a regular basis about some latest insult to the noble visual arts), countered on the Today programme that children can indeed appreciate a work of art deeply. Anthony Gormley told the Times that art is there to be experienced not understood. And the lady who wrote the Vagenda book told the Guardian that she had seen marvellous conceptual art aged three and that ‘access to art has made my life better’ and that ‘art teaches us what it is to be human’.