I dreamt last night that I was in an art class, trying to do a painting in the style of the Old Masters.

The teacher came up to me and began berating me for making "dead art", as she called it, saying that real art was all about rejection of past artistic styles, and held up Marcel Duchamp as the paragon of Art.

I tried to respond to her, but I was unable to make a sound, which frustrated me greatly until I woke up, still frustrated. So I'm going to set down my arguments here, in hopes that the constant tic in my lower eyelid will finally go away...

First of all, there's that whole "rejection of the past" which which the Dadaist movement (and much hideous 20th-century "art" music) was suffused. This is not just something I dreamed: a couple of years ago, a local artist was given a commission to create some sculpture for the interior of a new mall. She made some very lifelike bronze casts of children playing, and was roundly condemned by the local art community for committing the heinous sin of making non-abstract art.

But I digress. To my mind, you can only reject a technique if you're capable of using it -- otherwise, your "rejection" is little more than a case of sour grapes.

For instance, the famous "L.H.O.O.Q.", a purchased lithograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache pencilled in by Duchamp, fails to impress me. Had he actually painted a copy of the Mona Lisa (or an entirely original portrait) and then defaced it, I would be more disposed to consider Duchamp an artist who rejected what had gone before, rather than a talentless hack lashing out at an artistic tradition in which he lacked the ability to play a part.

Yes, I'm elitist: I venerate talent and tradition, and disdain those who consider them unnecessary. If Jackson Pollock's random paint splatters are a product of artistic genius, then any excitable orang-outan can be a genius if provided with a canvas and some tubes of paint.

When it comes to art, I'm ultra-conservative. I love the Old Masters (and Salvador Dalí). I love Renaissance music. I love Chaucer and Shakespeare. I hold out hope that, within my lifetime, artists (and musicans, and poets) will again be universally respected for their ability to create beauty, rather than their ability to shock.

But that won't happen until the pathetic sheep in the galleries stop praising crap for fear of being accused that they don't "get it".