‘The paintings are dreadful’ said the Times of the exhibition at the Wallace Collection, ‘Bumptiously confronting Titian, Poussin and other venerable elders’ according t0 the Observer; ‘neither eloquent nor commanding in their manipulation of paint, (the pieces) merely go backwards, spelling out a derivation’ said the FT. The critics, be assured, do not like Damien Hirst’s No Love Lost, Blue Paintings at the nationally-funded Wallace Collection until January 25. Now I hear the opprobrium is falling on the museum, and its director, for putting the exhibition on. It seems to come from the collecting quarter that thinks no painting is worth looking at until it’s 100 years old, and preferably by an Italian or French artist. I’m sure the chairman, John Ritblat, is turning a deaf ear to these moaning ninnies, but I hope he’s also turning on them and reminding them that this particular director, Dame Rosalind Savill, who has transformed the once quaint and little regarded collection in a niche of Fitzrovia that came into the national ownership almost by accident into a genuinely international resource with a series of gallery transformations and brilliantly unexpected exhibitions, including the enormously coup of a Freud show a couple of years ago. So what is she to do? The most celebrated living artist in the world, recognized by his peers who have elected him a member of the Royal Academy, who is best known for his sculpture comes along as asks if he can have an exhibition of his paintings. Does she say, ‘I think not, Mr Errum, not our sort of thing you know’? Like the stuff or not, these 25 daubings have brought more than twice the normal number of visitors to Manchester Square, something of which I hope Sir John is as proud of as he will be of Dame Rosalind’s new 18th century galleries due to open next year. And I’m sure he is aware that in the context of places like the Wallace, there is such a thing as dumbing up.