Selector Profile: Mark Lawson

Art is notoriously the area of culture in which we are most sensitive about declaring our preferences: people who are willing to call Citizen Kane boring or Shakespeare unwatchable will mutter a few diplomatic phrases about Van Gogh or Raphael, for fear of being thought philistine.

There are two likely reasons for this caginess about opinion of pictures: an image is small and quick enough to force a reaction without any of the evasions available in other disciplines - only halfway through, haven't got round to seeing it - taste in paintings is seen as more deeply revealing of our personality than, say, the books on our shelves.

My own taste in art was formed, in turn, by academic failure, religion, literature and television. The lowest mark I ever got at school - a flash of unfamiliar red ink - was for a portrait painted in third year art. Brother Martin even held my picture up to warn the rest of the worst possible heresies of composition: "You may note, gentlemen, that the head is square. You may also note that, in the general run of things, heads are round." My tear-swallowing response was that Picasso painted like that. 

"Possibly, Lawson, but Picasso does it because he's a great artist; you do it because you are a bad one."

Subsequently, I have met dozens of (usually literary-leaning) people who were discouraged in a similar way and it regrettably seems that art is a subject in which teachers rapidly establish the few who can do, presumably reflecting a prejudice that artistic talent (unlike spelling or algebra) is brought rather than taught.

Many years later, finding an old panoramic school photo, I noticed that there was something unusual about the shape of Brother Martin's head: it would have fitted more easily into a beer-crate than a hat-box. And so, suspecting that my failed third-form portrait had triggered a particular sensitivity in him, I was able, as in so many areas of life, to glamorise my inadequacy as Freudian. Even so, there was a twenty-eight year gap until I attempted another picture: when, for National Drawing Week, Quentin Blake was persuaded to teach me for Radio 4's Front Row. Though one of the set exercises - a frightened rabbit - came out more as an apathetic rabbit, I felt, as they like to say in football commentaries, that I had "faced my demons."

Yet, as this makes clear, I come to art as a non-practitioner in an extreme sense. Nor was I, as a child, routinely toured around art galleries; my parents' preferred cultural outings were theatres, museums and old churches. The latter was significant because, brought up as a Catholic, my earliest experience of art was sacred paintings. The Anglicans had nicked England's best churches but the Catholics still had, on the continent, the finest pictures. So I may not know much about art but I know what Popes liked: Titian and Raphael exhibitions are another occasion for facing my demons. The literary gods of my adolescence also brought me to art. I discovered Magritte (still a favourite artist) through Tom Stoppard's 1971 play After Magritte (which gives a logical explanation for a ridiculous tableau) and a reproduction of L'Empire des Lumieres on the cover of a collection of Harold Pinter's plays. I was introduced to the pictures of Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns and Grant Wood through dust-jacket reproductions or references by characters in novels by John Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and John Cheever.

Otherwise, and it seems important to say this at a time when the future and funding of serious television are much under discussion, I was taught about art by the rectangular academy in the corner of the living room: Warhol, Hodgkin and Freud, among many others, hung in my house in flickering colour long before I saw them stilled in art galleries.

And a Freudian or Jesuit would conclude that my enthusiasm for modern art comes from belonging (born 1962) to a generation of television viewers for whom the landmark TV art series was not Kenneth Clark's Civilisation but Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New. Hughes has gradually recanted and now favours the shock of the old in Goya and other masters, but I can see the continuation of his enthusiasms in the work of younger British artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Rachel Whiteread, the Chapman Brothers and Michael Landy.

Hirst's shark, Emin's bed, Landy's shredding of all his possessions and the Chapman's Hell are innovative, intricate, intelligent, narrative art and the glee in some sections of the media at the loss of many of their generation's achievements in the recent Momart warehouse fire was a terrible philistinism even by the standards of British popular journalism.

We tend, as I said earlier, to be sensitive and defensive about our taste in art. During the selection process for this exhibition - when the judges sat at a long table for two days as the public entries were walked past - we were mainly silent for the first hour, daring someone else to risk the first enthusiasm.

The natural competitiveness of media professionals may also have become an issue: Anne Robinson insists that she could force me to claim a painting simply by leaning forward slightly as it was brought into the room, which is odd, as I believed I was playing exactly the same game with her.

But taste, in the end, must be declared. This, then, is the selection of someone who came to art in a haphazard way, his taste formed by the Pope, the BBC, the American novel and a spell in the mid-1980s sub-editing the essays of Andrew Graham-Dixon and Marina Warner at the Independent; and who believes, probably also influenced by twenty years in journalism, that photographs, cartoons and illustrations belong in art galleries. My only regret is not being able to include a square head.