Madam,

Your correspondent Charlie Falzon accuses Patrick O’Brien of being ‘bad-tempered’ when he refers to Mr Davies, author of the Borth metal tree project, as a ‘self-styled artist’. But the quotation is incorrect.

Mr Davies is described as a ‘self-styled contemporary artist’. Not the same thing at all.

An artist is an artist. But what makes someone a ‘contemporary artist’? All artists living today are presumably ‘contemporary’ in a literal sense of the word. The arcane distinction that makes Mr Davies more ‘contemporary’ than others is best left to the judgement of the artist himself, as Mr O’Brien has rightly said.

Another correspondent rightly quotes Mr O’Brien as referring to Mr Davies as a ‘self-styled contemporary artist’, but sees the description as ‘pejorative’. I wonder why?

If that is in fact how Mr Davies chooses to style himself, then the meaning, if not purely descriptive, I would expect to be in some way laudatory.

Yours etc,

William Russell, Rue De Bellefond, Paris.

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