Empty gestures. (Outrage).

Art adores a vacuum, because a vacuum sucks in the media. If you really want press coverage nowadays you should follow the example of Martin Creed, winner of last year's Turner Prize (Britain's most prestigious contemporary art award, given at the Tate Gallery). Creed's most extreme exhibit was an empty gallery in which the lights flashed off and on. This was admirable as far as it went. But why should it stop there? Why not leave the lights on all the time? Or switch them all off? And why draw the line at a single gallery? Instead of an empty gallery at the Tate, why not an empty Tate Gallery?

And I do mean empty. Piles of bricks are too eye-catching; blank canvases much too self-assertive; what is required is nothing short of nothing at all. Then you can sit back and wait for the media response. It will not be long coming. Soon you will be praised for your economy of style, your reticence, your fluidity, but also for your impudence and your challenging sense of fun. And you will be praised for your integrity too.

If you do not believe me you should visit the exhibition of the work of The Three (at the Percy Miller Gallery, London by appointment) because these and other critical plaudits are all pinned up on the wall. In fact, the media response to the exhibition is this exhibition since The Three are not artists in the conventional sense at all. Like lawn-mowers, they create nothing but cuttings. Close examination of these cuttings reveals that many of them have been generated by New York based art critic Adrian Dannatt. He discovered The Three (by picking them out of a model agents' directory) and will cheerfully replace them with three more if he wishes. And if you sense a hoax, Bruno Hatt style, you would be right; but only half right. Art, as Marshall McLuhan observed, is anything you can get away with, but Dannatt is perfectly open about his aims. Contemporary art is now almost meaningless without an explanatory text and much of it is quite heavily textual in its own right.

The ensuing critical response (conducted entirely in words), is much more widespread and influential than the work of art itself. So Dannatt has merely done away with the work of art, and presented us with the discourse. He has created an Alice in Wonderland world in which artists communicate nothing but the results of their own communication strategies'. Ruskin, were he alive, might accuse Dannatt of flinging a pot of paint into the face of the public - but he would be wrong. Paint does not come into it.