HERE, contemporary art that discloses chutzpah and humour. The intrepid will find sculptural works inspired by and using 'Europe's largest catalogue of quality art materials, a.k.a. the [eponymous] Great Art series by the Gerstaeker family'.

Who? You may well ask, and I am none the wiser. Yet by stacking the books in the space, Ling usurps the preordained function, and significantly the value associations, inherent in these art materials. Voila! You have that which we define as art, today: the deliberately banal.

Any show that challenges the notion of greatness in art is OK in my book [to be published posthumously: Holy smoke! Did God just fart on my art?]. In short it's a great drawback that inept journos, snobbish critics, all manner of pseuds and poseurs, and even artists who should know better, all rely on stock terms.

Writing about greatness is mere puffery. Rolling out the old rhetorical formulae (Is it art? But is it great?) is an easy game to play -of hide'n'seek, with emphasis on the hide. In contrast, how hard is it to stand out in the open and take pot shots? Ling is not standing out there as spokesperson or paradigm of civilised humanity.

He is not artist-as-genius. Rather, he is being deliberately banal -the complexities of which are, perhaps detrimentally, justified by the whole of art history, and by extension the Western point-of-view.

Still, the underlying point is transferable. Ditch the outmoded language and implications. Shelve the hearsay from late Romanticism -least of all because art is dead, more because greatness, per se, leads us to hierarchy, leaders, class, colonialism -all manner of nonsense.

Yeun Fong Ling: Great Art is at International 3, 8 Fairfield Street, Manchester until Monday, November 4.

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