Naked ambition has harmed the Stuckists

The Stuckists are one of the more provocative art movements. They exist to fight for the return of paintingto the centre of artistic endeavour and debate, and to expose the alleged stranglehold on the art world by a group of powerful champions of concep-tualism led by the Tate chief Sir Nicholas Serota.

The Stuckists took their name from an insult flung at one of their number, Billy Childish, by his then girlfriend Tracey Emin, who shouted at him: "You're stuck, stuck, stuck!"

In their first major central London exhibition, the Stuckists feature paintings by one of their leading lights, Charles Thomson. The paintings are of his ex-wife, the artist Stella Vine. This pair also parted acrimoniously.

Mr Thomson's explicit paintings of Ms Vine are notable because she has nothing on in them. She did not sit for these paintings, I should add. Mr Thomson has clearly done them from memory. She has certainly not given permission for them to be exhibited. I have seen them and would describe them, to use a term which may or may not be a technical, art-historical description, as semi-pornographic. So, is Mr Thomson a cad getting some sort of revenge on his former wife in a most unpleasant way? He argues that the matter is more complex than that. Firstly, he says, accurately, that Ms Vine was, before she became a celebrated artist, a stripper. Indeed, one of the paintings is entitled Strip Club. I would dismiss this as any sort of justification. There is a huge difference between a woman choosing to earn extra money by performing in a strip club and having a representation of her naked, exhibited without her permission.

He gives a second justification, which is a little more difficult to dismiss. Ms Vine, he rightly says, has made her name with painful depictions of public and semi-public figures. One was of Princess Diana with blood coming out of her mouth. Another was of Rachel Whitear, a girl who died from a heroin overdose and was briefly in the news. Ms Vine's painting of her upset Ms Whitear's parents.

So, Mr Thomson asserts, this is a taste of her own medicine. He explains that his ex didn't worry about the reactions of Diana's children or the heroin casualty's parents.

Well, it is a superficially attractive debating point. But there is a world of difference between a work of art that tries to make a bigger point about the cultural significance of an event surrounding a public or semi-public figure, and showing your ex sitting open- legged and naked.

While Diana was undoubtedly a public figure, there is a debate to be had on whether artists can with a clear conscience depict young people who recently died in tragic circumstances without a thought for the parents' reaction. I think the artistic arguments will outweigh the temporary hurt caused to the family, but it wouldn't harm for artists to at least think about it.

The bigger point about Mr Thomson's ex-wife-baiting is where it leaves the Stuckists. For all their sometimes silly posturings, there was a need for a group to challenge the ruling orthodoxy in the visual arts. Not because the Tate hasn't made a massive contribution to contemporary culture, but because all ruling orthodoxies should be challenged.

How seriously, though, can we take a movement of artists, which offers in a flagship exhibition one of its leaders tryingto humiliate publicly, and in a depressingly sexist fashion, his ex- wife? I suspect the Stuckists may have been dealt a death blow.

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