Mick Hartley

"Leading British artists" have produced some posters for the 2012 Olympic Games. You can admire the results here (also at Creative Review).

They'd have done better to ask some commercial designers: the results, on the whole, are not impressive. The comments at the BBC are remarkably hostile – references to "the Emperor's New Clothes" abound – but it's a little unfair to damn them all. Some aren't bad. I like Sarah Morris's colourful Big Ben, and Rachel Whiteread's Olympic rings as mug or paint-pot stains is well done. Some though, are truly awful.

Chris Ofili's "For the Unknown Runner" for one. 

I see the Greek vase reference to the origins of the games, but that figure is….well, it's extraordinarily awkward. It conjures up not so much the dynamism of an athlete in full flow, more some mis-shapen foetus-like Dali creation. It's those legs: they're all wrong. And no, it's not intentional. This is not a poster for the Paralympics.

The problem is, I think, that Ofili can't draw figures. I know the feeling, as it happens: I'm not so hot at them myself. But then I'm not a Turner Prize-winning artist, and haven't (yet) been chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.

He's good with elephant dung, mind. Very good. Second to none. But he's stepped out of his comfort zone with this one.

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian thinks "Ofili is at his very best here, passionate and engaged, and this may be the poster that truly lives in memory as an image of the London games." Well, he may be right about that.

And then there's Tracey Emin: another artist who's represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.

What can you say?

Well, perhaps the first thing to say is that this has no relevance to either the Olympics or to London. But then you wouldn't expect anything else from Tracey. She does what she does. She seems very pleased with herself, mind, in that interview with the BBC's Will Gompertz. Why do you think, he asks her, that people doubted you could produce an Olympics poster? Well, she says, maybe they thought I was too hardcore or something….

Hardcore? Ha! She did, it's true, build her reputation on those pieces about sex – the unmade bed with tampons, the abortions and related misadventures, the tent with the names of everyone she'd ever slept with, etc. – and this did lead a number of people who should have known better to think she was some kind of revolutionary subversive giving the finger to a tired and moribund art establishment. But this – middle-period Emin, we might call it – seems to be her current "mature" style: schoolgirly scrawls of the kind you'd expect from a moderately talented A-level student, along with sickly sentimental phrases that would shame a Hallmarks card. At least here she gets her spelling right: usually, with her trademark dyslexia, she doesn't even manage that.

It's amusing, in a kind of a way, that she's now perhaps Britain's best known artist. I sometimes wonder if she really is that subversive force that people once mistook her for; if it's not all a huge j0ke at the expense of an abjectly conformist art world that, once it decided she was the face of the new Britart movement, and having lost all conception of what might constitute good art, is now unable to take back its original evaluation and continues to laud her increasingly ridiculous productions.

But no – she isn't.