The two of us wondered in past someone leaning nonchalantly in the doorway holding a plastic cup half full of wine, and who didn’t even glance at me as I passed, into a very good little gallery space – quite small, but well finished and lit. There must have been about a dozen other folk there, clutching their plastic cups. We wandered about, had a look at the 5 or 6 pieces in the show (which were not bad, but included a couple of very large digital photographs that I can only describe as conceptual). This took us about 15 minutes.

Then we stood around, waiting for the gallerist – or the artist – to come and introduce themselves, tell us what it was about. Or at least offer us a plastic cup of cheap fizz. Nothing. Not even did anyone acknowledge us.

What’s up with these folk? What do they have a gallery for? To show and sell work? Or is it just some kind of toy, like a dolls house where they can re-arrange things and invite their friends to have a look?

We gave them another five minutes to notice us, and then left. Clearly nobody expects to sell any work from this gallery at any rate.

The V&A – which is not a contemporary photo gallery but a museum – currently has only a very small room for photography, but fully half of the pictures were less than 10 years old and (you guessed it) printed very large, in colour, and were conceptual.

Whether you like this type of work is, of course, a subjective matter – personally I can think of no other art form that, so soon after it’s creation, has concentrated so hard on making itself mundane – but surely the balance is wrong? Is the collection really so lacking in good pictures from the previous 150 years?