It's one thing to turn to artistic pursuits to try to unravel what's going on in your head. It's quite another, as a rank amateur, to put your creations on display and expect people to pay to see them.
As Eddy Frankel writes in a withering Guardian review of Robbie Williams' new exhibition Radical Honesty, the musician is "not well - and being vulnerable and open in public is to be commended. But to present it as art, in a gallery, is to say you think this has aesthetic merit, cultural value." Frankel is unequivocal in his dismissal: "On a basic, artistic level, the work looks bad and expresses incredibly superficial ideas very poorly."
As he makes clear, though, this isn't simply a matter of Williams' oversized ego. He's been eagerly enabled by the gallery, Moco, when quite simply he "should never have been put in a position to have the ticket-buying public come face to face with [the creations]".
And therein lies the rub. Moco have chosen to showcase the ill-conceived dross of a celebrity rather than platforming the serious work of an up-and-coming artist - an all-too-familiar tale among galleries, but also publishers and record labels. It's a neat illustration of the problem of access that is blighting the world of art and culture, and (arguably) getting worse.
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