Even the section devoted to Minimalism resists the sort of uniformity that art history, ever straightening and cleaning, tries to impose.
The argument that art is ever devoid of politics and (at least implicit) moral judgments is either naïve or disingenuous and my critic doesn't strike me as the former.
Riley describes it as "one of the best-known works that pop art ever produced".
Whether you take Kosuth and "conceptual art" as your dividing mark, or Andy Warhol's silkscreen paintings, uninflected films and (apparently) empty self-image, or Donald Judd's reticent objects, it is widely agreed that art changed for ever in the 1960s.
"He never had a focus that was beyond art — ever," his mother, Carolyn McDemas, recalled in a recent interview.
Eventually, even the fragments disintegrated, becoming the sluggish mishmash that has prevailed in art ever since.
When you're dealing with populism, any populist can say that the most powerful art ever created has always kept one foot in the populist mindset and another foot in the more left-field creative, abstract way.
With politics being what they are, especially with the spectacle of the Trump presidency, Terris believes that art, perhaps more than ever, is the last refuge of pure creativity.
For the next seven nights, spectra will become possibly the single most-viewed work of conceptual art ever, given that it will be hard for anyone living in London not to see it.
The French artist's tales of torture and abuse are scarcely cheery – think a mildly prettified Louise Bourgeois – but then who ever said that art had to be nice, eh?
