Last year, my friend Greg and I went to the Turner Prize Exhibition at Tate Britain in London. The Turner art prize always attracts attention and controversy because its shortlist generally focuses on artists who, in many cases, work with ‘ideas’ rather than traditional materials like paint or marble.

A while ago I took part in a festival where I was given accommodation in the same house as a young art historian doing research on conceptual art. She and I met at breakfast one day, and I must have said something ‘old-fashioned’ about an exhibition of paintings I had enjoyed. She said that there was probably nothing more to be expressed in paint, adding that thank goodness the days had gone when artists could lazily reach for the ‘old medium’ of paint instead of working with concepts. She said that the ‘idea’ was the important thing today; the materials, the technical skill and the product were of secondary importance, sometimes of no importance at all. It was not even important that the artist should make the work – an assistant could do the job just as well. A work of art could be simply the idea, communicated in a description or document without even going so far as to produce an exemplar of the idea.