Jack Vettriano: just the Tom Jones of 21st-century art?

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/sep/19/jack-vettriano-tom-jones-art

Version 0 of 1.

Jack Vettriano, that meticulous painter of racing cars and high heels, beaches and butlers, is clearly getting a bit overexcited about his retrospective that opens next week at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. He has even been found almost likening himself to Van Gogh. He told Radio 4 that if Van Gogh could have sold his art as postcards and prints to a mass audience, as Vettriano does, he'd have "jumped at the chance".

That's true as far as it goes. Van Gogh likened the emotional effect he wanted from his painting La Berceuse to a "cheap chromo", a popular print. He thought his art had popular appeal, that it was for everyone – and history has proved him right. Van Gogh's Sunflowers are, dare I say it, even better known than The Singing Butler.

But to focus on the comparison between Vettriano and Van Gogh is to see how lacking the Scottish artist is in almost all the qualities that make art worthwhile. He has a fair bit of skill but no imagination and no heart. My deep dislike of Vettriano's paintings is not rooted in any desire to do down figurative painting. I love figurative painting. When it is good. But Vettriano makes scenes that are soulless.

He's the very oppposite of Van Gogh. Where the latter painted rough, humble things – a kitchen chair, or his bed – and invested each daub of the brush with all the passion that was in him, Vettriano fixes on fetishistic, stylish objects and paints them with a slick, empty panache. The distance between Van Gogh's chair and Vettriano's Bluebird car is the gulf between art that speaks to the soul and trash that titillates shallow values.

Big cars. Sexy women. The world of Jack Vettriano is a crass male fantasy that might have come straight out of Money by Martin Amis. There's nothing wrong with erotic art – some of the world's greatest art is erotica – but where Titian shares his awe of the human body, Vettriano constructs scenarios with all the emotion of an Airfix modeller's painted Spitfire.

When I was a teenager, my dad would occasionally drive me crazy by playing his Tom Jones record. The deep, hollow voice singing The Green, Green Grass of Home made my flesh crawl because it seemed so empty, so slick.

Jack Vettriano is no 21st-century Van Gogh. He is the Tom Jones of art: big, bold, brassy and devoid of inner truth.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.