06 February 2014, The Tablet

Tough credo


 
The work of the Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed, which has gone on show at the Hayward Gallery in London, is a salad of visual sensations, but light on meat Philosophical games are what we expect of continental artists: Duchamp’s existentialist in-jokes or Magritte’s ontological paradox that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe. British artists, even so-called conceptual ones, rarely venture down that road without alienating the general public. In the case of Martin Creed and his 2001 Turner Prize-winning The lights going on and off, the mass of the public was turned off without even seeing it.Last year the Tate acquired Creed’s Work No. 227 – numbered like all the artist’s works in order of creation – for a reputed £110,000. What did it ge
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