Arts: Crash! Bang!! Kaboom!!!

If you had carte blanche and a bomb, what would you blow up? Six celebrities light the fuse. Compiled by Katy Guest

Stephen Bayley

Design guru

Unfortunately, when criticism is too vigorous it can dignify the target. But I'll take that risk with the Turner Prize, the most stupid of pseudo- events. Possessing so little dignity to start with, I almost feel sorry for it. Here is an astonishing phenomenon which perversely endorses the modernist ideal of progress, although in the most depressing way: every year it makes the vainglorious Trustees and staff of the Tate Gallery look more ridiculous.

The Turner is a pseudo-event because it has no third party endorsement and no reality outside the institution which nurtures it and the media that report it. The public is either hostile or indifferent. With arrogance which would be magnificent were it not so contemptible, the prize's organisers dismiss criticism with the exhausted, "yes, but they laughed at the Impressionists" defence. I don't take second place to anybody in my enthusiasm for 20th- century culture, but Modernism was not concerned with abandoning rules, rather with finding new expressions for them. When anything goes, very little does. There are standards in modern art, but in the Turner Prize there are none. I suppose you could say in its defence that at least a winner made of elephant shit closes the loop between content and form.

John Shuttleworth

Comedian

Well, it might make a bit of a mess, you see, because I'd like to blow up the Carl Andre exhibit - those bricks at the Tate Gallery. It just breaks me heart, because they've not been correctly laid, you know, there's no recognised style - English bond or anything like that. A bricklayer would be holding his head in horror. It's just a complete waste, I mean, alright, if they'd been pointed up wi' mortar, compo, 3-in-1, whatever, then it would be a stable structure. Add a nice colourful laminate or something, you know. It would be a nice play area for children. A little hidey hole, you know. But that hasn't happened. They've just stuck the bricks there. Completely useless. It says nothing to the average man, or woman, in the street. Or toddler. Those bricks should be carted away and given to a pensioner. I could go round and construct a little outhouse with them. Perhaps as a section of their outside lavvy. Where the bricks are all mildewy and crumbling, you know. I could use some of those bricks to repair that outside lavvy. Or, a lot of pensioners now want an inside lavvy, don't they? They're not bothered about the outside ones.

So perhaps it could be a pig run. Something like that. They could be used to prop up an old car. Anything. I should think people trip over them in the Tate, don't they? You want pretty pictures. Of flowers and things. Lovely views. That's what people want to look at. So I repeat, those bricks should go.

John Shuttleworth is on tour. For details and venues call 0171-287 5010

Nicky Haslam

Designer

I would like to blow up the Pan Am building in New York, because I remember the area vividly before it was there. I watched from the offices of Vogue, as, in the early Sixties, this horrible thing arose in front of my nose. There used to be the most fantastic view down Park Avenue, but now the area - the end of Park Avenue and 42nd Street - has been boxed in by this appalling building. The helicopter pad on the roof is ugly, and can't even be used because it is too dangerous, and the building as a whole has made a screen across the beautiful, breathtaking area which used to house Grand Central station.

Martin Rowson

Cartoonist

A couple of years ago Time Out asked a group of Young British Artists what they thought was the most important recent development in British art. A depressingly large number replied "Charles Saatchi". So I'd like to blow up the Saatchi Collection, that monument to the indiscriminating omniverousness of a man who most closely resembles a rather natty basking shark gulping up the latest shoal of plankton to wash out of Goldsmith's. And to what end? Hirst and his ilk are the Kaspar Hausers of modern art, giving every appearance of having come blinking out of their cellars aged 18 completely ignorant of anything that happened before they first sat down to think up something deeply shocking. Thus the 20th century might never have existed: no Duchamp, no Dadaists, no Surrealists. Instead we have half-arsed iconoclasm, underwritten by a rich git who gave us 18 years of Tory philistinism and whose sensibilities have been so brilliantly boned in the hard, gem-like rigour of advertising, the Industry of Lies.

Am I being too hard? Or would blowing up all that "Art", worth so much money, be a far more shocking and provocative act of Art Terrorism? On the ruins we could establish a new School of post-Conceptualism, containing empty rooms while the spawn of Goldsmiths', sitting in their yachts off Cap Ferrat, trying to think, unsuccessfully, what to fill them with.

Lord Archer

Novelist, prospective London Mayor

Has to be Millbank Tower - a blot on the horizon.

David McAlmont

Singer

If I could blow up anything from the world of the arts, I would choose the novels of Barbara Cartland. Although the definition of art is a broad one, I'm not even sure that these can be defined in that category. Her work defines the ideas of art negatively. The books are not based on any kind of spirituality or truth. The ideas they contain about love and life are insulting, and their plots are pure escapism. I hate their unquestioning approval of royalty, and the way in which characters are connected with royalty. I hate the pink.

I remember an interview with Barbara Cartland by Terry Wogan, in which she said that the perfect man often comes along on a horse. The idea is clearly ridiculous. Perfect men don't come along on horses. If at all. Usually if I come across a piece of art that I don't like I instantly forget it, but not this body of work. All her work should be destroyed. Yes, I'd quite like to take on Barbara Cartland. I've never actually taken on anyone like her before.