Lori Earley

Another veteran of Roq La Rue, the Jonathan Levine Gallery and Juxtapose, the eerie and beautiful art of Lori Earley is dominated by wan and melancholic characters. Unfortunately, this distorted classical art features cartoon-like renditions of women, often looking sad or disturbed, which makes it evidence of my desire to subjugate them. It is therefore art that I'm not allowed to like.

Ray Caesar

Ray Caesar was born in 1958, in London, as a dog. Or so his bio would have you believe. There's nothing to indicate that he's fibbing, so we'll go with that. His art is very much in the style of the contemporary American Pop Surrealists, containing lots of fantastical other-human hybrids and eccentric characters. Many of the characters in his paintings have a certain haughtiness or aloofness or even ambivalence about them that contrasts them from the malevolent cuteness of the children that can be found in the work of Mark Ryden and others.

Ray has exhibited in galleries all over the world including Roq La Rue in Seattle and the LeVine Gallery in New York. I would claim to be a huge fan of his work and even go to see it in Manchester, England where it is showing at the Richard Goodall Gallery, but for the fact that some of his subjects are a bit sinister looking, and children, and as we all know men simply are not allowed to regard children in any way without being interrogated by the CP Nazis. It's art I'm simply not allowed to like.

Loretta Lux

There is nothing intrinsically subversive or anything that could in any way be construed as inappropriate at all in Loretta's work. However, all of the paintings are of children, and any man who loves to look at paintings of children must be at least a bit odd. They must be forced to reveal the motivations behind their love of this kind of art and be made to feel it important to justify it. Failure to provide adequate evidence that their interest in this kind of art does not indicate immoral intentions should result in the man being regarded in a suspicious way. It's in the rules. For this reason it's art that I'm not allowed to like.

Mark Ryden

Mark Ryden is one of the biggest names in Pop Surrealism. His work draws you in with soft, fluffy images in pastel colours, using such devices as doll-like characters with milky white skin and adorable anime-style eyes. You get subtle hints that all is not as it seems, as the circumstances of the characters become clear, before you are then assaulted with a blow to the back of the head. Starkly reminding us that despite the layers of pretense we've built around ourselves, we're not as nice as we'd like the rest of the universe to see us. That underneath we're malevolent meat, driven by our need to survive and capable of anything.

Mark's work has been exhibited all over the world and reviewed in such wonderful journals of Pop Surrealism as Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose. However, because he uses childlike pictures of innocence, the viewing of which could be construed as having an interest in inappropriate imagery, it is art that I'm not allowed to like.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

What makes Jake and Dinos Chapman's work palatable to the art establishment, and Trevor Brown's not? Could it be that they are Royal College of Art graduates? I think it could be. Certainly they have tackled much the same kinds of topics as Brown; paedophilia, facism, fetishism, consumerism etc. But yet they feel no need to escape, are lauded by their critics and have exhibited in such illustrious galleries as the Tate Britain.

Because they've dared to risk vilification, and showing any interest in the work of the brothers Chapman would also risk castigation of the unwary viewer, their art is something I'm not allowed to like.

Trevor Brown

Inspired by JG Ballard's Crash, Trevor Brown started out adding wounds and bruises to pictures of smiling girls to produce faux booklets of medical illustrations. Since then he's developed his art into what I've heard termed "an assault on the eyes." There's no getting away from the (mis)perception that Brown is one sick puppy. His work is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Many would stop to wonder what it is that makes a mind so twisted. Others would be so filled with revulsion and piqued by anger, they'd vilify the artist and anyone who expressed any interest in his work. It's been suggested that these reactions are indicative of the power of western culture and society to program our views of every subgroup within it and without it, and a good reason for Brown to attempt to heroically subvert that programming. He explores such taboo topics as paedophilia, BDSM, torture, sex, death, mutilation, religion, world politics, and fetishism. Married to a Japanese teddy bear maker and former bunny girl, he escaped from the less than accepting mores of western critics to Japan in 1993. Unwilling to follow the politically correct norms of the west, Brown refuses to be hindered by what is generally agreed to be permissable as subject matter.

Disturbing, objectionable, sacreligious, blasphemous. For sure. Subversive, certainly. Brown is not a popular man among the art viewing public and critics tend to avoid him and his work. What could a critic say? That it is not challenging enough? That it has no artistic merit? That it is exploitative and has nothing at all to say. I think that he has plenty to say, that we should all be listening and while we fear him and his work, refusing to even debate its merit, little will change.

Having said all of this, he has done a lot of commissioned work on album covers, and books of some of the stronger work are available from Amazon.

However Trevor Brown is a man one is definitely not allowed to like.

beinArt Surreal Art Collective

This beautiful juxtaposition of sugary sweet with cold, vampiristic intent came from the mind and hands of Michael Hussar, whose work can be found in the private collections of such illustrious individuals as Warren Beatty, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppolla and the US Library of Congress.

Michael's work contains harrowing, nightmarish imagery including satanic looking clowns and other nasty demons. It also forms part of an online collection of surrealist art that can be found at the beinArt Surreal Art Collective.

This collection of art is so vast I haven't been able to view every item in there. However, there is sure to be something to offend every taste and sensibility, to corrupt every innocent mind and to turn even the most conservative, good, clean-living people into the sons and daughters of Satan himself. Before you know it, you too could be fornicating with all manner of non-human and eating babies for supper. All the more reason why this is art that I'm not allowed to like.