Is it art – or is it interior decorating?

IS THERE, I wonder, anything worse you could say to a serious artist than that you bought their new painting because it worked well with your sofa?

The whole project of modern art was, in a way, to escape the confines of the parlour walls. From Marcel Duchamp to Jackson Pollock, artists were smashing their way out of the frame, knocking art off its pedestal.

The absurd, ad hoc sculptures of Dada appropriated everyday, mundane objects. The vast canvases of the abstract expressionists would not fit over a fireplace, and conceptual art remains a riposte to easy commercialisation and commodification.