Does anyone actually like any of this Bloomsbury Group rubbish?

I'M NOT by nature a conspiracy theorist, but every so often it is difficult to maintain one's equilibrium. Faced with a set of beliefs which have, apparently, come close to taking over the sanity of many perfectly sensible people, it is impossible to believe that there was not, after all, some appalling criminal mastermind behind the whole thing. Every so often, when the conspiracy rises again to the surface and takes hold of many members of society, one starts to feel like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the last person alive not to be infected by this grotesque insanity. We survivors of the intellectual plague generally communicate discreetly with each other, in the unobserved corners of bars, when we are absolutely sure nobody is listening.

But from time to time it is appropriate to speak out, to send a message of hope to anyone out there, to say "You are not alone" in wanting to fight this awful conspiracy. And now the time has come so to speak out. What makes me want to jump up and down with rage and loathing is the belief in what has come to be called "Bloomsbury"; the idea that the intellectual life of this country, in the first half of the century, was principally carried on in the novels of Mrs Virginia Woolf, the paintings of Mr Duncan Grant, and half-a-dozen other no-hopers. It is, all in all, a ghastly plot, driven by the snobbery and ignorance of their acolytes. And the HQ of the conspiracy, right now, has moved to a dozen rooms on Millbank, and is mounting an exhibition of the works of the very worst offenders.

Does anyone, really, like any of this rubbish? Does anyone really think it any good? The novels of Virginia Woolf must be the most grotesquely overrated works of literature published in English this century. The only time I've ever got to the end of any of her novels is when I was being paid to read them, and no sum of money would ever induce me to pick up The Waves again. And then there's the art. Of course, some of them did do a lot to promote great artists in this country. Roger Fry and Clive Bell, with their passion for Cezanne and Matisse, certainly achieved something in getting them talked about; and, after all, publicity is what all of them were very good at. It was certainly admirable to persuade collectors and museums in this country to buy some fairly hair-raising art when it could still be afforded, and there are some first-rate collections of Post-Impressionism in this country due to their efforts. But, for heaven's sake, someone else would have done the same thing. And a great deal of what the Bloomsbury Group wrote and said about the Post-Impressionists - "Significant Form" and so on - is perfect gibberish, without any perceptible meaning or meaningful perception.

That, of course, didn't stop them talking up their own achievement endlessly. When Virginia Woolf said that human nature changed in 1910, all she was talking about was the first London exhibition of the Post-Impressionists. Could anything more utterly provincial and absurd be conceived of, to think that the moment her taste and the taste of her society altered could, even in hyperbole, be identified with a change in "human nature"? Even if we are just talking about art, does anyone seriously suppose that Picasso and Matisse gave a toss for the opinions of the Bloomsbury aesthetes? Of course not; only in the dreams of a lot of idiots in Cambridge.

As publicists for radical new art, they did have some value. If we want to see what they achieved as artists, we only have to take a bus down to the Tate Gallery and see the current exhibition of the works of three of them; Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry. The only one of any real intrinsic interest is Vanessa Bell, who has some kind of discernible personality. The paintings of Roger Fry, too, have a distinct curiosity, since his writings were so influential at the time. Nobody, however, can ever have thought that Duncan Grant was worth putting on show; his paintings are the most abject imitations of any current European fad. As a whole, it is the most startlingly dim show. If you put any single Matthew Smith, let alone a Matisse, in any of the rooms, it would utterly annihilate their pretensions; if you placed a Morandi still-life next to one of Duncan Grant's, Grant's reputation would be brought to an embarrassingly abrupt end.

So why on earth is anyone interested in these sad cases? As promoters and publishers, they are worth a bit of attention. They drew the attention of the English to Cezanne, and never let it be forgotten that Virginia Woolf did discover and publish at least one great novelist, Henry Green. But as creative figures themselves, you might as well forget it. The on- going attention is, to be honest, largely due to their rackety lives; Vanessa shagging Bunny shagging Duncan shagging Mallory (the luck), Clive shagging Vanessa and having Angelica who goes on to shag Bunny. How utterly fascinating, at least if you share the appalling snobbery of most of the Bloomsbury biographers.

Does it matter? I mean, though Duncan Grant's natural level is that of the exhibition in the local public library, does it do any harm to puff his reputation a bit longer before it is finally extinguished? Well, in a way it does matter. Because it's surprising how long-lasting the false values of Bloomsbury are proving.

People still believe Virginia Woolf when she tells us that she is a great novelist, and Arnold Bennett, who, in reality, was a genius, was a nothing. If we listen to Bloomsbury, Duncan Grant was a greater artist than Sargent. And there are figures who are still, falsely, perceived as living in the foothills of Bloomsbury, because that is how Bloomsbury chose to see them; masters like Matthew Smith or Henry Green. Let's stop fooling ourselves, and admit that, as FR Leavis said, these people belong not to the history of culture, but to the history of publicity.