The Stuckists weren’t trying to be polite.
When Billy Childish and Charles Thomson founded the movement in 1999, they did something that felt almost quaint in retrospect—they wrote a manifesto. Not a tweet storm, not a Medium post, but an actual manifesto with numbered points and everything. The first one declared that conceptual art was “pretentious, nihilistic, and trendy,” which, honestly, wasn’t exactly a hot take even then, but the way they said it mattered. They weren’t academics critiquing from ivory towers. They were painters—actual painters who mixed pigments and cleaned brushes—and they were exhausted by what contemporary art had become. Or maybe what it had always been, depending on how you looked at it. The movement’s name itself came from an insult: Childish’s ex-girlfriend, the artist Tracey Emin, had told him his poetry was “stuck” and he needed to move on. So he did, but not in the direction she probably intended. He took the insult, added “-ism” to it, and built a whole aesthetic rebellion around the idea that being “stuck” on painting—on figuration, on emotional authenticity, on craft—was actually the radical position in a world obsessed with the shock of the unmade bed and the pickled shark.
Here’s the thing: the Stuckists understood design in a way that YBAs (Young British Artists) seemed to willfully ignore.
They weren’t anti-design—they were anti the specific design language that had come to dominate gallery spaces in the late ’90s. That clinical whiteness. The way conceptual installations required so much explanatory text that the wall labels became more important than the work itself. I’ve seen exhibitions where I spent more time reading than looking, and I guess that’s supposed to be the point, but it always felt like a kind of intellectual gatekeeping dressed up as democratization. The Stuckists rejected this entire apparatus. Their exhibitions were deliberately messy, crowded, unprofessional by contemporary standards. They showed work in pubs, in community centers, in spaces that didn’t have the sterile gallery aesthetic. The paintings themselves—figurative, often narrative, emotionally direct—were designed to communicate without mediation. You didn’t need an MFA to understand a Stuckist painting, which was either their greatest strength or their fatal flaw depending on who you asked.
Wait—maybe “design” is the wrong word entirely, or at least it means something different here than what we usually think.
When Thomson and Childish critiqued contemporary art through what I’m calling “design,” they were really attacking the entire system of presentation, context, and meaning-making that had calcified around conceptual practice. The design of a Damien Hirst exhibition—the lighting, the spacing, the institutional weight of the Tate or the Gagosian—was inseperable from the work’s meaning. A shark in formaldehyde in your garage is just weird taxidermy; in a gallery with the right lighting and a provocative title, it becomes Art with a capital A. The Stuckists saw this and called it out as fundamentally dishonest. Their counter-proposal was almost Victorian in its earnestness: make paintings that mean something even when they’re leaning against a wall in bad lighting. Use composition, color, figuration—the traditional tools of visual design—to create emotional impact that doesn’t require curatorial framing to exist.
This didn’t make them popular, obviously.
The art world in the early 2000s was not exactly hungry for earnest figuration with literary pretensions. The Stuckists were called reactionary, nostalgic, technically mediocre (which, to be fair, some of them definately were). But their critique of how contemporary art used design—or refused to use it, depending on your perspective—hit on something real. Conceptual art had increasingly relied on the design language of museums and galleries to generate meaning. The work itself could be almost anything—a pile of candy, a blank canvas, a performance—as long as it was presented within the right institutional context. The Stuckists wanted to strip that away, to make work that carried its own weight visually and emotionally. Whether they succeeded is debatable, but the attempt itself was interesting. They were arguing that the design choices of contemporary art—the minimalism, the whiteness, the reliance on context—weren’t neutral. They were aesthetic choices that privileged a certain kind of education, a certain class position, a certain way of seeing.
I used to think the Stuckists were just nostalgic for something that never really existed, some golden age of painting where technique and emotion aligned perfectly.
But the more I look at what they were actually doing—the manifestos, the demonstrations outside the Tate, the aggressive promotion of figurative painting as a radical act—the more it seems like they understood something about the design infrastructure of contemporary art that the YBAs took for granted. When you walk into a white cube gallery, you’re already being told how to look, what to value, how to interpret. The Stuckists wanted to build a different kind of space, both literally and conceptually, where painting could recieve attention on its own terms. They failed, mostly—the art market had no use for their earnestness, and the movement fractured and faded. But their critique of how design shaped meaning in contemporary art? That part feels more relevant now than it did in 1999. Turns out being stuck isn’t always about refusing to move forward. Sometimes it’s about refusing to follow everyone else off a cliff.
