Founded in 1994 by a Royal College of Art student, this most unique art event raises money for the RCA Fine Art Student Award Fund by selling art works by famous and not so famous artists for just £40. There are only two rules, firstly the artwork must be produced on a postcard and secondly the artists’ identity must be a secret, only revealed to the purchaser when they can look on the back of the card.

postcard 223, is it or isn't it?

What makes this event such a success is the wonderfully affordable price and the joy of deciding on the art for its own worth, rather than because it is by Damien or Peter or Tracey. There is also of course the delicious game of seeing if you can work out the identity of the artist and thereby snaring a potentially priceless work of art. My only guess at the moment is 223 which I thought looked a lot like Howard Hodgkin but then maybe a student has painted it in his style……

postcard 82

This year you can view the work online. The site is a bit cumbersome to use. To see each card as a larger image you have to keep returning to the thumbnails where I would have preferred a next button, but what the online site does give you is the time to dip in and out when you get a spare few minutes, rather than visiting the RCA in Kensington and getting visual indigestion as you try and look at all the art works of which there are 2700!

postcard 249

postcard 284

The online site also gives you an option to create a favourites basket and I have been busily gathering all the art works I would like a second look at. This is as far as I have got from browsing the first 500 postcards. No surprise that my selection is mainly photography.

The sale begins at 8.00am 22^nd November 2008 and you are only allowed to buy four postcards. See you there.

The word nice raised its head again this week and I was reminded of my mother’s heeding, that it is a lazy word, devoid of any real meaning. I came across it in The Times’ bold attempt to explain Modern Art. The newspaper invites readers to comment on a picture, which they post on line and print in Times2 along side the expert’s view. This week they were soliciting views on Francis Bacon’s portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne. It was the review by Alain Williams that caught my eye and ire. To quote Mr Williams “It is horrible – I can’t see why anyone would want that on their wall or do anything other than walk straight past it. Producing nice pictures might be boring, but it’s what most people want”.

Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne 1966. © Estate of Francis Bacon

My immediate response to reading this was, you don’t have it like it, but must we all be condemned to a world that is boring and nice, bland and dull. For me art isn’t about being liked or only for hanging on the sitting room wall. Art is about thought and challenge, it is about asking someone to take time out from the bombardment of images we see everyday, and consider the image held in our gaze. Not all art is good and it is perfectly ok to say I like this or I don’t like that.

There are vast periods of art that I don’t linger over as I stroll around the National Gallery or Tate Britain because it doesn’t particularly hold my interest. But to confine our visual senses with the prescription that art should be nice is a boring proposition and I suspect does not reflect what most people want.

The Francis Bacon exhibition is at the Tate Britain 11^th September – 4^th January 2009