I’ve been to a talk by two very clever and talented men: the American novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem and the English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. They were talking about Lethem’s book about his art collection, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Never have I left a talk with such a warm glow of schadenfreude. Here were two gifted men who had nothing interesting to say about their chosen subject. It was an evening full of ArtSpeak and hot air, a facsimile of intelligent ‘cultural discourse’, as they say in the art world. The interesting Lethem and the brilliant Curtis had done the unthinkable: they’d become boring.

Oh, what a joy it was to witness! I got more pleasure watching these two have nothing to say than if their conversation had been full of dazzling insight and wit. Why is that? Am I envious of their success? Yes. Do I envy their talent? Definitely. But my pleasure in seeing the limitations of their double act goes deeper than that.

I always get an illicit pleasure in watching interesting and talented people be as boring as I can be. It’s something you don’t see so often. Their capacity to be as boring as the rest of us is a great cultural equaliser – for a moment the great and the gifted have fallen off their pedestals and into........

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