What will become of artists who paint?

What hope is there for artists following the sale recently of the robot Ai-Da’s portrait of Alan Turing, entitled ‘A.I. God’, for a cool $1 million? Someone has perhaps paid over the odds for a 3D print with a few marks added by a robotic arm and a few more by studio assistants to areas of the canvas Ai-Da couldn’t reach. Innovation wins.

In the 1970s, the walls of art school degree shows were studded with plaster casts of students’ genitals. By the 1980s, students were discouraged from attempting realist painting, but messy grey abstract works were still acceptable. Then it was found objects and piles of stuff. One young studio assistant I knew in the 2000s had a tutor at art school who’d gained his first-class degree by filming himself pouring a glass of milk over his head. The young assistant had a classmate who got her degree by filming herself engaged in an act of onanism. Pick up a paintbrush in an official state-funded art school these days and you’ll be shown the door. It’s all digital.

But what about artists who paint? With a brush. We’re up against it: critics – professional and amateur, less than honest gallery owners, fashion, celebrity and the ‘elite’ dealers who skew the market on a whim.  We’re not even to be trusted as individuals near affordable art shows, only welcome under the aegis of a gallery. Galleries take 50 per cent, sometimes more. There are battles to be fought against self-doubt, failure, poverty, hostility and ignorance – and the gut-wrenching horror of the exhibition opening. Most of us don’t want to bend the world to our will, just paint a picture to the best of our artistic, intellectual and technical ability, in the hope that someone will buy it and help us scratch a living.