More from the Guardian – something else to disagree with from Jonathan Jones, in fact.

Trafalgar Square is one of London’s noisy, dirty, congested, wonderful hearts, and there are four plinths surrounding Nelson’s Column. Three are surmounted by statues of a king (George IV) and two generals (Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier), and the fourth hosts a rotating series of modern art commissions. The original intention was to put up a statue of William IV, but that failed (no money, the besetting curse of art projects) and then nobody could agree which monarch or militarist deserved the honour most.

Jones has promoted a fun new conspiracy theory – the only reason the fourth plinth hasn’t been permanently occupied is because dear old Lizzie hasn’t popped her clogs yet, and they’re Secretly Planning an equestrian statue of her for it. It’s total bollocks, of course, but it would actually be quite a nice idea – an equestrian statue of a queen who was never an empress or a militarist.

There’s nothing wrong with representative sculpture, and we can’t deny people like looking at it – I’m extremely fond of statues of horses myself, even if they have people sitting on them. And just because the poor dear is a queen doesn’t mean we should be prejudiced against representations of her. Besides, Jones’s alternative proposal is to commission a permanent modern art piece for the plinth, and I rather feel this is missing the point – having pieces displayed for a while is fairly normal in most contexts, and doesn’t make them any less worthy than putting one up there permanently.

The point and purpose of Art isn’t to be shown off, or for the Establishment to demonstrate how good and modern it is; it’s so people can see it. Think of the Fourth Plinth as a taster exhibition.

Personally, I think we should use all four for this – put the poor old king and his generals out to grass, send them off elsewhere. There’s plenty of precedent – a statue of Gordon of Khartoum was put up in 1888, and moved elsewhere in 1943. If you can swap Gordon of Khartoum out, you can do it to any militarist you like.

Jonathon Jones, in the Guardian, writes about Banksy and mentions “[T]he qualities that graffiti can offer modern art: its violence and chaos and paranoid mania.”

What a load of bollocks. What a pretentious Establishment fuckwit. Stuck in a binary upperclass/lowerclass dichotomy, much?

It’s our city, our museums, our art. We don’t need to be violent or chaotic, manic or paranoid. We can be sly and playful and subversive. Tagging walls (in either sense) claims them for the public rather than the Public. You might call it outsider art; we couldn’t possibly comment. That label is about the people applying it, not the artists. Oh, and we’re not the underclass either.

I’m rather curious about why Jones thinks graffiti is fundamentally violent, chaotic, paranoid, or manic. It may look that way, but I suspect that’s really just projection from the illegality of it. There’s nothing intrinsically violent about it, and another word for “manic” is “exuberant” or “lively”. If it doesn’t belong in colonnaded galleries and Georgian museums, nor do African textiles or Moorish calligraphy.

So it’s just the same old argument, really. “Not one of us.”