"This year's Booker shortlist was worthless; none of the novelists on it has any chance of being remembered in 50 years, none of these books can compare for one second with the great tradition of English literature. Set one of these minor talents alongside a Jane Austen or a Joseph Conrad, and it is clear we live in mediocre cultural times. The Booker should be abolished."

No, I've never read a comment like that about a Booker prize shortlist either. I have, however, read (and written) many such critiques of Turner prize shortlists. But why does contemporary art get such a rough ride in comparison with the contemporary novel?

Critics and the public are prepared to say infinitely more dismissive things about new art than ever gets said about new literary fiction: it's common for modern art to be mocked as "junk", but rare for even the most outrageous or embarrassing novel to be dismissed as not worth the paper it's written on.

Yet, surely anyone who has ever spent time reading new fiction has sometimes, in reality, felt such negativity. To read a novel that doesn't work is, in effect, not to read a novel at all: it is to waste your time. And a lot more time is stolen by bad literature than by bad art – which, after all, you can just walk past.
In a larger sense, the statement I started with is almost certainly true of lots of contemporary fiction – how many of the novels reviewed from week to week could stand up to any of the 19th-century greats? But obviously, we want to read novels of our own time. And it's the same with art. Very few works of art in current exhibitions are going to be remembered, still less accepted into the canon of art history, but contemporary art is the mirror of contemporary life. Its tactics, methods and attitudes reflect this world, here and now. Art is currently more acute at doing this than the novel. Shoot it down and you're shooting the messenger. Praise a so-so novel and you're hiding from reality.