Follow the instructions and start your very own art collection. Put 50p in the slot, pull the handle and you're issued with a set of French neo-conceptualist Gerard Collin-Thiebaut's special issue collectable unlim-ited edition pseudo-postage stamps. Bob's your oncle. Not being real stamps, but an artist's simulacra, they substitute crowned heads with art world powers that be. Take your pick: Nicholas Serota, Leo Castelli, Charles Saatchi.
Other art references are made. Collin- Thiebaut seems to be carrying on where Duchamp left off, pro-ducing readymades for the 1990s. Taking his cue, also, from a more recent predecessor, he has made work that speaks in the numbed monotone perfected by the late Andy Warhol. Its timbre, you might say, is heavily ironic: is this what art, and its marketing, have come down to?
Collin-Thiebaut's creations are now on sale from five appropriated GPO stamp dispensers mounted on the walls of a converted tram shed in Glasgow. He is one of five French artists who have been selected by Jean de Loisy - le hot young curator of the moment - for ''Le Cinq'' at Tramway. Glasgow 1990's way of hon-ouring the auld alliance, ''Le Cinq'' is, too, the latest manifestation of French cultural diplomacy, a con-sciousness-raiser designed to further British awareness of contemporary art on the other side of the Chan-nel.
This is no small task. The French government might fund the visual arts with an openhandedness not seen in this country since the days of Charles I, yet it is also true that hardly a single notable artist would seem to have emerged from France during the last decade. The French may have regional initiatives and new Maisons de Culture by the score but - or so it is commonly asserted - no worthwhile native product to justify the maintenance of...
