Massow heaps new scorn on ICA

Ivan Massow today continued his ridicule of contemporary art following his forced departure as chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

And he hit out at the organisation which he had done so much to promote in the past, saying: "It has morphed into a pillar of the shock establishment."

Mr Massow's exit from the ICA was sparked by an article in The New Statesman in which he criticised conceptual art - typified by Martin Creed's Turner Prize winning room in which a light flickers on and off - as " pretentious, self-indulgent craftless tat".

He was summoned to a meeting of the institute's council on Monday night when all 12 council members decided that his position had become untenable. He immediately tendered his resignation.

The 34-year-old today took advantage of his new-found freedom to further pursue his tirade against "Brit pack" artists and those who applaud them.

"Ever since the beginning of my involvement with the ICA I have harboured a vivid, romantic image of the institute as it was - a hotbed of 70s radicalism," said Mr Massow.

"It had gained a reputation for showcasing the daring and avantgarde and holding debates or showing exhibitions that others were too frightened to. People went there to speak and hear the unthinkable.

"The irony is, now that shock has become the new establishment, that the ICA has morphed into a pillar of the shock establishment - cultivated by the Brit pack."

Clearly referring to celebrated weird works by publicity-seeking artists such as Creed, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, he added: "Like me, art lovers have all sat and watched a naked woman fire a peach from her vagina knowing full well that it won't make the local paper.

"They've also smelt endless faeces, been titillated by pornography and scared by a chamber of horrors paraded as 'art', and yawned with the rest of us.

"Having described the arts establishment as totalitarian in their stoical, silent defence of conceptual art, what better way for the ICA to demonstrate it than by sacking me.

"But the final irony is that they didn't seem to see that they had inadvertently validated my comments."

In his fateful New Statesman piece, Mr Massow lamented that artists who produced "craft" were no longer appreciated by the art elite.

Writing in The Guardian today: "My words have struck a resonant chord in articulating something the pistol-waving captains of the new avant-garde never dared say before. They want substance, they want elevation, they want ... 'craft'.

"Figurative painting and sculpture have been dismissed as 'merely craft' by some, as dead art forms by others. Artists boast they can't draw.

Mr Massow has received hundreds of messages supporting his stance from names as diverse as Sir Anthony Caro and Julian Clary.