Obiter looks forward to the annual Law Society Art Group exhibition, which takes over Chancery Lane’s Reading Room every January after the Christmas tree comes down.

But are those who hold not just a practising certificate, but also a pencil or paint brush, ready for this year’s judging panel? Enter veteran art critic, author and broadcaster Edward Lucie-Smith (pictured).

Lucie-Smith, Obiter notes, doesn’t mince his words. The 2007 show ‘Damien Hirst Collects’ prompted the observation: ‘In the British art world there is a sense that things are suddenly at a standstill – that the creative energy of the 1990s has run out.’ Ouch.

Lawyers’ artistic egos, though, may be safe – if they’ve stuck to doing a nice watercolour or a traditional oil. As Lucie-Smith thunders in another piece: ‘Museums of contemporary art… have become the refuge of crude metaphysical concepts that are extremely vulnerable to close examination.’

Obiter hopes no lawyer-artists have tried anything too edgy this year.

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