The good news about Seduced By Art is that it is the first major photography show mounted by the National Gallery. New approaches are being explored, and modern moods. The bad news is that the show itself is a mess: incoherent, under-whelming, and sent all over the place by hit and hope curatorial thinking.

The gallery has, it seems, “specially commissioned for the exhibition” new photographs to compete with old paintings, but that it should feel compelled to do so surely indicates that there must have been too little evidence to lend importance to the link, and thus that it is a point hardly worth the demonstrating in an exhibition. If the underlying thesis is that photography must be acknowledged as an art of pictorial legitimacy equal to that of painting, yet, in order to support it, photographers must be let loose in the gallery, there to be inspired into rivalry with the old masters, then the thesis must be very weak and the curators should not have been allowed to engineer the evidence. To turn the thesis on its head, however, and prove that painters with no imagination are readily seduced by photography (and even use it as a form of underpainting, even of easy collaboration), then the visitor to the National Gallery has only to wander upstairs and examine the spurious paintings of Richard Hamilton (and why are these, pray, in Trafalgar Square rather than any of the too many Tates?), or go next door to the National Portrait Gallery where, annually, ghastly portraits based on photographs are jubilantly exhibited as art.

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To be blunt, I was not provoked but sickened by this exhibition, nausea my overwhelming response to it. As an exhibition, its content is much less than the ugly catalogue suggests and the hang so haplessly confused that it fails to make the points energetically promoted in the text — but the catalogue too is repellent, the nastiest example of book design ever issued by Yale University Press. None of this would matter were it the show of the year in Milton Keynes or Margate but it is in London, in Trafalgar Square, in the National Gallery with Christopher Riopelle (in charge of 19th-century paintings there) as co-curator, and that magisterial institution is disgraced by it. Shoddy, mischievous and gravely mistaken, intellectually the work of students at some post-polytechnic university, those who devised it have seduced the National Gallery, led it astray, debauched and corrupted it.

...Seduced By Art is an enthralling show, beautifully selected to express the numerous ways in which painting has inspired or affected the evolution of photography. It has work by contemporary art photographers such as Nan Goldin and Thomas Struth, but most of the pictures are 19th century, and not the least of its pleasures is the intermingling of paintings by Goya and Degas, say, with photographs by Fox Talbot and Nadar.