If the stuckists go down in art history, and the jury is still out as to whether they will, Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision by stuckist co-founder Charles Thomson may well become their signature piece.
This direct, flatly painted cartoon refers to two of the stuckists' biggest betes noires: Tate director Nicholas Serota, who stands accused of promoting "Serota Tendency" one-note art, and Tracey Emin, who famously told then boyfriend Billy Childish that his figurative work was "stuck, stuck, stuck". He paid her back by founding the stuckists in 1999 to rubbish conceptual art in general, hers and the YBAs in particular. Viewers to Spectrum London next month can decide if Thomson's pointed little piece is, at £30,000, worth three times more than the knickers it pillories.
Stuckism held that the British art world was one big conspiracy to keep figurative painters down while "conceptual" flim-flam was overpraised and promoted. "Artists who don't paint aren't artists," wrote Thomson and Childish in the Stuckist Manifesto in 1999, adding that postmodernism is destined for "the dustbin of history". Ironically, just like postmodernism, many of these images are highly referential - to other art movements and other artists. Paul Harvey's Charlotte Church is a rather cheesy take on a 1970s take on art nouveau.
The stuckists deride what they see as cosy relationships between the Arts Council, publicly funded galleries, art critics who happen also to work for galleries whose artists they then review, and a handful of "inner-circle" galleries that represent the artists whom public galleries buy. Only this month the stuckists declared "victory" after the Charity Commission criticised the Tate (their biggest bugbear) for buying a £700,000 work off Chris Ofili when he was a serving trustee. So far, so fair enough.
The problem for the stuckists is that their remarks are often so much more eye-catching than their art, a tendency which this show hopes to disprove. Meanwhile, the art world has moved on - figurative painting is once again all the rage. It is not just Charles Saatchi, whom the stuckists claim they influenced, but big name US collectors such as Eli Broad and the Rubells who are buying paintings again. The danger for the stuckists is that one of them might go for Thomson's Nicholas Serota - as a period piece that protests against an era that no longer exists.
· Stuckists - Go West is at Spectrum London, 77 Great Titchfield Street, London W1, from October 6 to November 4