Enough with the dead guys, Martin Creed was born 1968 and still with us...and still making us scratch our heads.

Martin's the maker of the most minimalist piece of art ever, bar none. And he won Britain's best art award for it, the Tate Museum's Turner Prize. Creed outdid even the revolutionaly urinal by Marcel Duchamp, who turned the pisspot over and called it Fountain. He "displayed" an empty room. Really, just completely empty with nothing in it. Then he turned the lights on and off every five seconds. Why the heck they let him flick the light switch off and on when you and I can't even touch a sculpture is a mystery to me. But that flicking made him world, or at least Euro-, famous. For essentially throwing a lightswitch rave. Art is fun.

Maybe the exhibit was a reaction to those long Sunday meetings he sat slouched in as a kid in Glasgow, being part of a Quaker family and all. Quakers are great and for the most part very polite and quiet. And non-violent, which I love. But they replaced those dramatic Sunday services held by cross-dressing men who sing, with gatherings of ordinary Joes and Janes, called Friends, who sit in a circle and only speak when they feel called to by the inner voices. For the most part they sit in silence thinking over and over about all their shortcomings. Doesn't that make a couple of hours with men in luxurious gowns and crazy hats touting over-the-top silverware, and offering food and drink to boot, sound awfully good?

Creed is not, as far as I know, a practising Quaker. He is a keen musician though, with a serious following. His first CD was called, I'm not kidding, "Nothing." He is at least sincere about his art, or lack thereof. Creed's been quoted as saying both, "I don't know what art is" and "I wouldn't call myself an artist." There's probably a lot of folks who would agree.