'This is not a glass of water'

"Is that plug a work of art? It is, if you say it is. [...] Never trust an artist..." Brian Duffy, photographer.

I fast-forwarded through the documentary about this guy that I recorded the other day - it was mildly informative and that was the only interesting thing he said in the whole programme. In the early 70s he took all of his photographic back catalogue and torched it. 'Was this a very significant moment in your life?' 'No, not really.' I assume that the hour-long programme was quite far down the road by the time that interview took place.

But is a plug a work of art? I have always tried to avoid going to the Tate Modern, it makes me angry. I went that one time and there was a glass of water on a shelf.

'This is not a glass of water', said a sign.

'Clearly it is,' I thought, 'and it's sitting on that shelf there.'

I read the sign in greater detail - this is not a glass of water, this is an oak tree. Interesting.

Apparently the term 'glass of water' is a meaningless construct within an equally meaningless reality. A glass of water can be anything you want it to be. Thing is, I kind of like my meaningless reality - if I happened to be eating out at a restaurant and I was brought an oak tree to the table to quench my thirst and told that they were freeing me from the Matrix, I would probably throw my chair through the meaninglessly constructed window. Artists are frequently idiots.

A glass of water is only called a glass of water because we have agreed in community to label it so - if we all decide to call it an oak tree then so be it, that doesn't detract from the significance of a nice glass of water. I appreciate the artist's role in wanting to provoke people into thought, but perhaps they could do it in a more constructive way that doesn't require a government grant. We don't, for example, need any kind of linguistic audit that will find better ways of expressing things that we all understand each other to mean when we use them anyway.

Perhaps we should be celebrating and glorying in life and reality rather than seeking to make it meaningless. These are the two kinds of artist - the dead and the happy.