Sometimes you have to be big enough to admit that you got it wrong. Take conceptual art, which you had assumed to be a world peopled by charlatans who had very little idea what they were doing. But when you studied some of their pioneering conceptual experiments you realised that - far from having little idea - many of these artists had absolutely no idea at all.

Not that I include the work of the Turner prize-winning artist Martin Creed in this category. No, I include Creed's work in the category of “Is this guy smoking something?” art.

Creed's new work, arriving soon in London, involves getting a bunch of athletes to run around Tate Britain and... Whoops! Please delete back to where it says “Britain” and insert a full stop. There is no “and” anything. The athletes just run around the gallery. That's the art.

Creed likes to keep things stark. He won the Turner Prize for an exhibit in which the lights in a bare, white-walled room flickered on and off every few seconds. Bare white walls also feature in another of Creed's works, exhibited in America last year, featuring a video of a man walking in front of an empty white wall and vomiting before walking away (Yes, of course I've just checked this fact. Do you imagine I'd write that without double-checking it first?).

Of course, Creed wasn't the first. Artists have always known in their water that bare white walls represent the acme of great art. We non-artists walk into a gallery with bare white walls and assume that we've arrived two days too early and jot a note in our diaries to return when the porters have got around to hanging up the artworks (to be honest, we also feel bilked buying souvenir art postcards that are all blank white cards, just like the ones you can buy in any stationer's).

Even Renaissance painters understood the artistic merit of not messing with the purity of bare white walls. But back then they were too poor to challenge their Philistine patrons:

Duke Ludovico Sforza: My dining hall in Milan looks so drab, Leonardo. You see? Just bare walls. That's why I want to commission you to paint a colourful mural on that back wall.

Leonardo da Vinci: Are you mad? It's all white. You can't get any greater art than that.

The Duke: I want something that will jolly the place up. Maybe combining a religious and a dinner theme. What about The Last Supper from the Gospel of John? Fancy trying your hand at that?

Leonardo: I feel so compromised! Duke, can we at least have some athletes running around the refectory while you eat? And maybe a few guttering candles?

The Duke: Leonardo, you know sometimes your crazy ideas about what great art is make me want to throw up right here in this bare white room.

Leonardo: Thank God! Some of my creative genius is finally beginning to rub off on you.

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