31 MARCH 1990, Page 22

Artistic immorality

Sir: Steven Berkoff's nonsense (Letters, 17 March) is perhaps self-evidently so. Any artist is fundamentally a craftsman; his craft may be writing, poetry, painting, music or what not. He becomes an artist

LETTERS

when his work starts to tell us something about ourselves. Challenging 'conventional morality' is not, in itself, a legitimate purpose for 'art'. It only becomes so when conventional morality is false and the writer will make an effective challenge by describing it.

Promoting sodomy, adultery, child abuse or whatever merely because he feels like it, or feels he has some `God-giVen intuition', is not the activity of an artist. It is the activity of another sort of person.

M. S. Lovell

6 Hawthorn Avenue, Torpoint, Cornwall