Ian Cooper reviews Taboo by Nigel Halliday.
With the title Taboo and the subtitle “An Artist Comes to Know Good”, you get quite a good clue that this novel is going to be an entertaining satire about modern art.
It is set in the time of so-called Cool Britannia in a suitably depressed provincial city and an art college dedicated to an empty conceptualism. The hero, from a sloughed-off church background and desperate to do real art, finds himself increasingly unable to beat the system and so is forced to join it with hilarious and profitable results.
