Artist paid thousands of pounds of public money to photograph M1 road signs

An artist was paid thousands of pounds of public money to take photographs of motorway road signs. Matthew Smith drove up and down the M1 photographing the signs in black and white – then coloured the pictures by hand. But the project, which cost £4,500, has been branded "barmy" by a taxpayers' campaign group. The photographs were turned into 45,000 postcards which are being given out free at Tibshelf service area.

The project was paid for out of a £120,000 Derbyshire arts fund, money for which came from the National Lottery, Arts Council and £7,000 from Derbyshire County Council. Mr Smith said the project examines what he calls the "non-place" of the motorway, where visual stimuli are "pared down to the bare minimum – the grey of the concrete, the white of the road markings as they zip by underneath you, the green of the grass verge and the droning pitch of tyres on tarmac".



But Taxpayers' Alliance spokesperson Charlotte Linacre said: "This barmy funding is a sign that cash is being wasted and public spending is not geared towards providing things taxpayers actually need." London-based Mr Smith said he did not think it was a waste of public money because the money came from funds specifically targeted at boosting the arts. He said: "It was an arts grant that was spent on an arts project, so it was money that was not available to spend on anything else." He added that the artistic merit of the project was that the postcards could become a keepsake.

"It is not just something to look at, it is something to take away. I would like people to actually send them to people on their way back from their holiday," he said. David Gilbert, curator of re:place, the arts project that commissioned Mr Smith, said he thought that valuing what art is worth is "an old debate". He said: "People seem to be quite happy going to a modern art installation yet they are troubled when it does not look like a painting." He said of Mr Smith's postcards: "It might be possible for people to see that it is a waste of public money, but that is the way that the arts is funded."