Columnist of the Week: Is Duncan Smith nothing more than a piece of installation art? We should be told

Once there was art and there was life. Art was long and life was short and we all knew where we stood with them.

Suddenly, as if everyday life has been caught up in a rather bad science fiction film, the dividing line between the real and the imagined has become oddly blurred. We get our drama and narratives from reality TV while story-tellers in prose and fiction increasingly borrow from their own lives and personalities, spicing up fiction with fact and confusing us still further in the process.

The other day in New York, an art student called Clinton Boisvert played his part in the new reality-bending game. Required by his sculpture class to create a "site-specific work", he constructed 37 black boxes, painted the word "FEAR" on each of them and left them in subway stations around the city.

New Yorkers, perhaps not surprisingly, failed to appreciate the artistic intent behind Mr Boisvert's sculptural take on their mood of nine-elevenism, and all hell broke loose. Commuters panicked, stations were closed down, the bomb squad was called in and TV news bulletins went into overdrive.

Meanwhile, back at the young artist's college, an uh-oh moment was occurring.

Mr Boisvert showed his teacher and his class some snapshots he had taken of the box in Union Square station and elsewhere. "We were all saying, 'Wow, how interesting'," his teacher later told reporters. "Then it dawned on me. I said, 'Clinton, you didn't leave them there, did you?'" A few minutes later, Mr Boisvert was on his way to the office of the Manhattan district attorney, where he was charged with reckless endangerment.

Installation art is everywhere; it is the cultural expression of the moment.

Hardly has something happened, when some smart and sassy artist is out there imitating, repeating, re-enacting, ironising. Until now, the installations have been relatively harmless. A few months ago, for example, an estate agent and his girlfriend were persuaded by an artist to spend a week in bed together, doing all the things they normally did in bed, but in the front window of a gallery in Soho. According to the artist, the work was "to make people sit up and take notice of the new sexual revolution". But where does this all end? How do we know where life ends and the work of an enterprising art student begins? Was Ronaldino's heart-breaking fluke of a 40-yard shot, past the flailing arms of the pig-tailed English keeper, in the World Cup in truth a cunning work of installation art, pointing up the vain idiocy of sporting passion?

Perhaps the affair between Edwina Currie and John Major was, as everyone said at the time, too good to be true, being in fact a savage artistic comment on society's association of sex with the young and the beautiful.

Maybe the appointment of the world's least charismatic politician to lead the Conservative Party was nothing less than a ferociously apposite illustration of the dangers of politics as showbiz.

Turn your children into grasping capitalists

Junk mail is not always entirely useless. This week, I received a leaflet from the Royal Bank of Scotland, encouraging punters to introduce their children to the joys of banking. "Give them more than money this Christmas with a Youth account – Make it happen!" was the message on its cover.

The Youth account turned out to be quite an eye-opener. A Cash Club for those aged seven to ten "makes learning about finance fun" and gives them tokens for saving "exchangeable for a range of goodies, including a frisbee, calculator, computer mouse mat, camera and many other items", apparently.

Savers in the 11 to 15 age range are offered a cashcard, the chance to withdraw up to £50 a day and various incentive discounts on CDs, DVDs and computer games.

Perhaps today's children, pre-teens and teenagers will whoop with joy when Santa brings them their Youth accounts but personally I would prefer banks to be a little more honest in their sales pitch for "finance fun". A copy-line reading "Why not turn your youngster into grasping little capitalists this Christmas?" would be a start.

What the brilliant new Archbishop of Canterbury calls the market state clearly likes to get its claws into its citizens good and early.

Partridge, and an own goal by Norwich

GPs in East Anglia are said to have a private code when dealing with patients who are slightly slow-witted and peculiar. They simply write in their notes "NFN", which stands for "normal for Norfolk".

Those of us who live in this part of the world, until now, had no particular problem with the fact that we have something of a reputation for being simple, the result, it is unkindly implied, of excessive and inappropriate affection among our ancestors.

To tell the truth, there are moments – standing in a queue at a supermarket, or walking past pubs at closing time on Saturday night, when certain Norfolk folk do indeed seem a touch more neanderthal in their general mien than one might perhaps wish.

But now the joke has gone public and is much less funny. One of the comic themes of the recent Alan Partridge show has been the strangeness of Radio Norwich – a tactful renaming of Radio Norfolk – listeners.

"They're not stupid in Norfolk," Partridge said at one point. "They're just different."

At first, there was mild annoyance at these slurs. A bewildered, slightly hurt correspondence broke out on the letters page of the Eastern Daily Press.

What on earth was the show on about? Perhaps we could invite Steve Coogan, the comedian behind the insensitive DJ and television presenter, to visit out lovely county.

Now, disastrously, local dignitaries have tried to show the world that Norfolk folk are not different at all – indeed, that they can lead the laughter.

One councillor suggested an Alan Partridge Heritage Trail might be established – a visit to a Little Chef off the A11 or a tour around the aisles of Somerfield in Diss both put forward as possible high points.

It is a truly terrible idea, an own goal of which even Norwich City would be ashamed.

In trying to grin our way out of trouble and play the complex game of irony and self-mockery, we are merely confirming that we are ever so simple-minded and out of touch.

A spanking good time with Santa Claus

The theme of sado-masochism seems likely to be the topic of late-night conversation over the holiday season. During Channel 4's fascinating, depressing documentary on the life of John Osborne, to be screened on the evening of Christmas Day, reference is made to a dinner party at which Osborne (top) and Ken Tynan (below) excitedly discovered that they shared an interest in spanking.

Is this sort of thing really appropriate viewing for the holiday season? As it happens, it is. A teacher at a school I visited recently had been researching, in the interests of multiculturalism, different ways that Christmas is celebrated around Europe. She discovered that, in many countries, Father Christmas is accompanied on his way round the world by a less jovial figure – a spanker, in fact, who is known as Père Fouettard in France and Black Peter in Holland. Perhaps here at last we have an explanation for this peculiar enthusiasm.

Little Ken and young John learnt to associate novelty and excitement with the arrival of Mr Spanky down the chimney. The rest of their lives were a search for that heady seasonal thrill.