Brian Sewell and the art of insulting your hosts

When it has come to developing a career beyond journalism, Brian Sewell has been prepared to take a few risks.

He made the traditional pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela for his first television series in 2003, and traipsed across Europe to retrace the 18th-century Grand Tour, for a second.

But the outspoken critic's daring reached new proportions when, during a one-man show in a Cornwall theatre, he decried exhibits at Tate St Ives as "despicable" and compared its legendary sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth to Leerdammer cheese.

Dame Barbara, an artist considered by many to be the equal of her contemporary and great friend, Henry Moore, has a museum to her name at the site of her studio in St Ives, where she died in a fire in 1965, aged 72. But Sewell, whose previous outbursts have included a declaration that an exhibition in Gateshead should be targeted instead at "more sophisticated" audiences in London, was unflinching. He described her as being "like Leerdammer, something one has of necessity rather than taste".

Sewell's most withering verdict was reserved for the Tate's grandiose Art Now Cornwall exhibition, which claims to bring together the leading lights of contemporary Cornish art. Nonsense, said Sewell. The exhibits were dull and predictable, just like those of the Newlyn School, the artists' colony based at the fishing village of the same name near Penzance.

To some, this outburst will seem like the same old Sewell. He is, after all, the man who denigrated women artists last year on the basis that they are "no good at squeezing cars through spaces [and] if you have someone who is unable to relate space to volume, they won't make a good artist". Rachel Whiteread's Embankment, at Tate Modern, was dismissed as a "pile of rubbish" in that particular outburst.

But the critic's words chime with a fierce debate currently raging in Cornwall about the direction of its contemporary art, in which some local artists accuse Tate St Ives of elitism.

Indignant about what it sees as the omission of the more challenging local artists from Art Now Cornwall exhibition, Penzance's Goldfish Gallery has launched a counter-exhibition to show off such names as Tim Shaw, who has a burgeoning reputation among London buyers, and David Kemp.

After attacking the Tate, Sewell declared himself highly impressed with some of Goldfish's artists, especially Shaw.

"In its 13 years, Tate St Ives has done very little that has been challenging," said Joseph Clarke, director at the Goldfish. "There's a feeling that its big new exhibition is full of career artists and none of those who have been living in the shadow of the Tate."

A flurry of letters by artists to The Cornishman newspaper have reflected the same point about the Tate exhibition, co-curated by the gallery's outgoing director, Susan Daniel-McElroy.

"All too sadly this exhibition epitomises the lazy disregard which our public servants employed in Cornwall's public galleries show to our Cornish artists," said one.

Mark Osterfield, the acting director of Tate St Ives, insisted that choosing artists for the exhibition was a curatorial process and could not include every one. "In the past few years there has been a desire to see Tate St Ives more involved with contemporary art than historic," he said. "We want to be better engaged with the artistic community of Cornwall."

Followers of Cornwall's art legends also leapt to their defence. Penzance's Penlee House Gallery, home to many paintings of the Newlyn School artists, said the colony was about more than pretty pictures of fishermen. "It is a common misconception," said the gallery's Jonathan Holmes.

But Sewell would beg to differ. The school, he insisted, offered paintings of "crusty old men wearing sou'westers."

Big mouth strikes again

On Damien Hirst

"The dead sharks are all crap, of course, but he did once have some work in an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, some boxed pieces, which were really quite intelligent"

On Jonathan Miller's Reflections show at the National Gallery

"The abject genuflecting to that man [Miller] by everyone except me was quite nauseating"

On working at Christie's as a dealer

"I couldn't bear to sell paintings to the undeserving"

On the volume of public art in Britain

"There are Kapoor balls and blasted Sky Mirrors being scattered across the country"

On elderly male artists

"It's male vanity, this desire to go on, women know when to give up, when something has been achieved. Most British artists would benefit from an early death"

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