This strikes me as a good article, which is not surprising given that it was linked to by Arts & Letters Daily. It's Josie Apppleton of Spiked writing about Brit Art, Conceptual Art, Marcel Duchamp's Urinal, and so forth:

In fact, when reduced to the 'idea', most modern British art becomes banal. This is a good sign. Mark Quinn's Self (now lying in the Saatchi Gallery), which involved removing several pints of blood and freezing it in a cast of his head, doesn't succeed on the level of the idea. The idea is 'I am my blood', or something like that. As an idea, it's worse than alternatives, such as 'I am my class' or 'I am my religion'. Self is impressive as a work of art because of the audacity of Quinn's chosen material - and because of the haunting effect of the finished product, which seems to have the waxy quality of a death mask. Nauman's 'Raw War', by contrast, would lose little on being reduced to the idea.

There is little point in opposing the art in the Turner Prize with some fixed idea of 'proper' art. The Stuckists, who demonstrate outside the prize every year, show how this position easily slips into caricature. Proper art is paint and canvas, they say – which ends up with a ridiculous fetishisation of the medium. It is as if they attribute paint with almost magic qualities, so that you only need take a few brushstrokes in order for it to be real art. The conclusion must be that, while every primary schoolchild produces art, Damien Hirst does not (one Stuckist recently described his work as 'taxidermy').

In actual fact, painting is just one medium among many - arguably no better or worse than video art, readymades or installations. At a recent debate, the British artist David Cotterrell said that when he moved from painting to other media, he applied the exactly the same standards of self-discipline. It wasn't as if when he painted he was serious, and when he began to use video and interventions he started just messing around.

There are major problems with conceptual art, but modern British art cannot stand accused on these grounds. Rather than demonstrating outside Tate Britain calling for a return to painting, it would be far better to head inside.

I agree about painting not being that big a deal. Painting is a basically obsolete picture making technology, which may hang around in the same way that organs still hang around (in cathedrals and churches mostly, which likewise hang around, but elsewhere also) for as long as there are people who can play the thing, even after the invention first of the symphony orchestra, and then of the recording studio, the subsequent Kings of Instruments that dethroned the organ. Painting is now finding a new lease of life as an adjunct to digital art, much as organs now play along with symphony orchestra, where you paint with a computer rather than a literal paint brush.

But however non-reliant on the trivial insights served up to us by conceptual artists, and however unimportant it may be that the people doing it don't paint that much any more, Brit Art of the Tate Modern sort doesn't seem to me that appealing. I haven't seen anything by David Cotterrell, but from time to time videos produced by other "artists" pop up on our televisions from time to time, usully in connection with the Turner Prize, and they do not inspire. My reaction to these silly little flickerings is to say: sorry mate, Spielberg, or for that matter the bloke who does the Walker's crisps adverts, is doing this stuff seriously and you're not. Whatever you may feel while you're doing it, "just messing around" is exactly what you are doing. "Painters" were, and still are, the best painters around. Is Cotterrell up there with the best video artists? I don't think so.

It really is time I did that piece about why it matters what "art" is, why it matters who "artists" are (or are thought to be), and why it is accordingly reasonable to complain about this or that work of "art", even if it is easily ignored.