‘It was hard coming after the shallow, egocentric YBAs’: brilliantly bolshie artist Ryan Gander lambasts practically everyone

He thinks painting is futile, the YBAs were an embarrassment, and most artists today might as well be working in carpet shops. So why is his new show full of, er, paintings? We meet the confounding British artist‘This is so bad isn’t it?” says Ryan Gander, grinning like a naughty schoolboy. “People are going to hate me when you write this up.” The 50-year-old conceptual artist has just finished telling me why, not only does he dislike drawing or painting, he finds the very act “futile and dumb”. He explains: “Copying reality with a pencil and paper just seems completely mad to me. It’s such a weird act. Why would I draw you when I could just take a photograph?”Gander has many such opinions, from how we measure the value of work to why 90s Brit art was a load of nonsense (more on that later). He also has a superb way of communicating that makes whatever he says seem like the most obvious thing in the world. After an entertaining couple of hours in his company, I leav