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The director of a charity that encourages young people and families to visit exhibitions has accused the artist Jake Chapman of snobbery after he said taking children to art galleries was a complete waste of time.
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, said it was "typical of the art establishment to say we're all simply not clever enough to understand them".
She also warned of the effects of isolating children from galleries. "How many doctorates do they say we need to appreciate Picasso or Pollock?
"Young children are just their latest target. But they're also the most dangerous to deny access to art. Because that's all a baby will remember, well into adulthood: art isn't for them."
Chapman, who along with his brother, Dinos, is known for controversy-courting art, caused outrage among the artistic community after he said it was "arrogant" of parents to believe their children could comprehend artists such as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, and that the assumption was insulting to the artist.
Chapman, a father of three, told the Independent on Sunday that standing a child in front of a Pollock was "like saying … it's as moronic as a child. Children are not human yet."
Birkett said not showing art to children at a young age could destroy interest in the subject."Kill any natural, joyful response to art at an early age, and you could kill it for life. Then where would artists like Jake Chapman be? No one would look at or buy their work."
She condemned the idea that appreciation of art only came with age and said the importance of introducing children to art from a young age was a founding principle of Kids in Museums. "At what age exactly does Chapman think we can wander into the room full of Kandinskys? Four? Five? 15? When is that magical moment when we begin to take art seriously?
"The truth is that magical moment is birth. Enjoying art of all kinds can begin at a very young age. I took my eldest daughter to see a Bridget Riley exhibition when she was 10 weeks old. She gurgled, laughed and dribbled at the brightly striped paintings.
"To say she wasn't responding to them would be denying what was happening before our very eyes. She might not have been able to write an essay on her response, but she was without question responding.
"How much better for that response to come straight from the heart and emotions, rather than coolly and calculatedly from an overeducated head. Wouldn't we all secretly like to feel like that when confronted with a work of art? Wouldn't we all like to soar with joy?"
She added: "Deny access to babies, and what happens to their parents? Are they banned from appreciating art too until their offspring are old enough? Or do they have to employ a babysitter just to go to the Tate on a Saturday morning?"
Birkett was not alone in her condemnation of Chapman's views. Speaking to the Times, the sculptor Anthony Gormley, whose work includes the Angel of the North, said his experiences of seeing art as a child had made a lasting and valuable impression.
"I don't think art is to be understood – it's to be experienced," he added. "I wouldn't be an artist today if I had not been taken to art galleries as a child. Yes, I didn't understand the history or the principles out of which modernity arose, but that didn't stop me from understanding vitality, horror, confusion."
Photograph: David Levene
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, page 28
