Labour's latest art collection? It just doesn't hang together

A rock album cover designed by the Pop artist Sir Peter Blake, a portrait of the Queen by Andy Warhol and a series of works by relatively obscure young "designer" artists have been bought by the Government to hang on the walls of ministers' offices.

The newest collection of art, purchased by the Government's official buyers, will hang in Downing Street, Whitehall and embassies around the world. Yet it includes few household names and is littered with works by largely unknown thirtysomething artists.

Senior figures in the art world are dismayed by the selection, which they say reflects the mania for modern works and ignores traditional genres such as landscape. It includes an acrylic composition by Tania Kovats, a fashionable young artist based in Hackney, who says her work is intended to set up an "enquiry into the spiritualised ontologies of art".

A leading member of the Stuckist movement, which was established to protest at the obsession with the likes of Damien Hirst, said he was appalled by most of the Government's choices.

"The state is now a major patron of art and I would rather they didn't buy crap," said Charles Thomson, founder of the Stuckism Gallery in London. "The people in the offices where it may be hung don't want it. The public who are paying for it don't want it. The only people who like most of this work are the people selling it."

Buyers from the Government Art Collection have also invested this year in work by up-and-coming thirtysomethings Paul Morrison, Blaise Drummond and Mike Silva, whose oil on canvas is entitled Puddle V.

The list of purchases, seen by The Independent, includes a hand-coloured print by popular young London artist Adam Dant, whose Shoreditch as Globe is a spherical depiction of the London area.

Hannah Starkey, whose staged depictions of young people have been collected by several major galleries including the Tate, is the most acclaimed of the young photographers represented. Other photographs show the fronts of Asian-run grocery shops.

The Department of Culture believes that by investing in little-known artists now they could be buying the Hockneys and Freuds of the future while they are still affordable.

But art critics say they are mystified by the decision to invest in such obscure works. Meredith Etherington-Smith, editor of Art Review, the magazine of modern and contemporary art, was among several senior art figures who said they were unfamiliar with most of the work on the list.

"I don't understand the mix. It doesn't hang together," she said. "If you are going into a chancellery or an embassy, you won't see something very English."

Among the more familiar names in the new collection are the pop artists Sir Peter Blake, best known for creating the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album cover, and Andy Warhol, the iconic American artist.

The Warhol screenprint of the Queen, which he completed in 1985, two years before his death, shows the monarch around the time of her silver jubilee in a "postage stamp" pose with a dark purple background. Recently the Government's art collection has been investing in "Brit Art", including works by shock artists Jake and Dinos Chapman.

Other artists have attacked the collection's obsession with the voguish "brat pack" and said it is guilty of marginalising Britain's best figurative and landscape painters. The Brotherhood of Ruralists, which was co-founded by Peter Blake, said it was bitterly disappointed that ministers had not asked for landscapes to be represented.

"There's a huge body of artists who are totally disenfranchised," said Graham Ovenden, a co-founder of the Brotherhood. "They should be buying across the board and represent what is going on in the true arts scene in Britain today. But they are keeping up the general tradition of stupidity, bigotry and wasting public money."

¿ A £25,000 award celebrating the best of British design is to be launched in a bid to do for design what the Turner prize has done for the visual arts.

The Design Museum in London is establishing the prize for the UK-born or UK-based designer or team that has made the biggest contribution to design in the preceding year.