(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 26 April 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine Greer, she was quite a big name before she had an exhibition here. What will this retrospective do to her reputation?

GERMAINE GREER:
She has already been short listed for the Turner Prize, so the reputation is pretty well made. It's clear from the way she works that there's a lot of investment in what she does. In this, she is supported by Becks beer, for one, and she is at that interesting interface between art and marketing, which always fascinates me, because I think marketing is the art form of the 21st century. She is also extremely eclectic, makes all kinds of references to the graphic tradition before her. It's very sophisticated, serious work. It's important to recognise that she doesn't do the technical part of it herself. She is not the actual print maker. She is, as it were, the director of this audio visual experience, which is somewhere between video and film, and still photography, all of which she uses. One of the problems with the exhibition is you need a lot of time, and it's very difficult to separate what you are listening to and what you are seeing from all the other things that you can glimpse and hear. It's difficult to see them all together in a gallery, but ultimately I have to say that I think she is a good artist, and an important artist. I think the real message is that style is the new content. That's perfectly logical it should be about style. It's just I find at a certain point I am not interested. It's almost got no political dimension. In fact I found myself becoming completely fascinated by the interiors.

TOM PAULIN:
It's the absence of politics. This is the end of history. It's narcissistic, weightless, fantasy, decadent art that's somehow survived into the next century, but still saying there is nothing here and there is soon going to be even worse than nothing. There is one good moment, the terrific actor Ray Winstone, with this enormously long cigarette ash. I watched and watched, and thought, "Is it going to fall on his trousers, or is he going to put it in an invisible ash tray?" It's like a point in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali where a raindrop falls on a leaf, and you watch it form and then it drops, and wait to see what happens, and then it stopped and the loop started again. So I don't know what happened to it.

LAWSON:
There is a still life which looks like a painting of a bowl of fruit, and then you look at it and it's actually moving its film. She is competing with two major entertainment mediums, film and TV. How well does it compete?

CRAIG BROWN:
What Tom was saying about the cigarette, I am sure that wasn't part of her purpose. Tom has seen her poetry and it didn't exist within it. The trouble with film, like the bit which you showed of the naked woman walking along the street, I then found myself, you are just distracted by that kind of film. I thought, "What are the lorry drivers thinking? Is that King's Cross, Hanover Square?" These might be my own deficiencies. The first one you go into is the party with Marianne Faithfull and there are seven screens showing different people, moving from one to the other. Germaine said that's very technically adept and sophisticated. Then I thought I could have been at that party and seen it live. There seemed to be no art in it.

PAULIN:
A party is a mobile creature it keeps changing its spots and it was static.

GREER:
There was the drama of the conversation between the man and the woman, where the woman is responding all the time and trying to draw him on, and he is quite knowingly manipulating her reactions. One of the things that Sam Taylor-Wood wants you to do is like what Warhol wants you to do. He wants you to stop interpreting, stop contextalising it and just look.

LAWSON:
She has been making silent movies.

BROWN:
But the exhibition comes with long explanations before each room of such amazing astute qualities. It says, "The nude woman walking down the street...."

LAWSON:
Fade out there.

BROWN:
It is a load of rubbish, what is written.

LAWSON:
The exhibition continues at the Hayward Gallery in London.