At the redesigned, Lotteryed-up, new-cafe-and-everything Camden Arts Centre in Hampstead (all of artistic London was there on its opening night just over a month ago), the central exhibit is a light fitting. I say central: Cerith Wyn Evans's Image (Rabbit's Moon) is a huge black Venetian glass chandelier with a large, whited-out Edwardian gallery all to itself. The art is in the way it turns on and off. Like Martin Creed's 2001 Turner Prize winner The Lights Going On and Off, it is phased, linked to a computer with a text message translated into the dots and dashes of Morse code, which in turn governs the way the chandelier "speaks".
Are you with me so far? It's a lovely big repro chandelier, 17th-century style. The text is a touch of the Raymond Williams - when he defines "image" in his 1976 book Keywords. Outside the gallery plays a short 1950s film by Kenneth Anger. It all looks lovely from the Finchley Road, and you know it's meant to be art from the words.
I was expecting more of the same from the Victoria and Albert Museum's new "Brilliant" exhibition of contemporary lighting. Only bigger. I thought there'd be stadium effects in the Cast Court and huge glowing lily-pads in the front hall (where they've hung that huge colourful chandelier from Chihuly - Mr Glass). But this exhibition is much more modest: positively domestic, all displayed in a medium-sized room and a corridor. There are things you'd quite like to take home; things that exist to make a point; and a few that are already registered "design classics", such as Tom Dixon's Mirror Ball lights, big spheres of shiny blow-moulded metallised plastic with a bulb inside that hang or sit on stands or just lie on the floor, looking just the job for a "Themes and Variations" interior.
Form doesn't remotely follow function in most of this stuff. After the first modernist flush of excitement with the naked incandescent bulb, lighting returned to conceits and postmodern whimsy with a vengeance. As the V&A's accompanying book - Brilliant: lights and lighting by Jane Pavitt - shows, the exhibition is not about the latest from John Lewis. These are lights with something to say. Pavitt sees a lot of exploring and subverting and commenting going on with these little objects.
They have names such as Don't Run, We Are Your Friends - an acrylic pendant lamp in a vaguely 1950s spaceship shape - or Flap Flap, which could be Bhs's latest in kiddies' bedroom night-lights except that it stands waist-high on its rigid cord, subverting something. There are a fair few "visual jokes", as they called them in the 1980s - the kind of thing that moves swiftly into the novelty design shops of Upper Street, Islington.
Although there is much that is genuinely clever, the aesthetic of the banal becomes really tiresome. In her book, Pavitt writes that Rody Grauman's 85 Lamps, a "found" chandelier made from wire, bulbs and sockets, shows "challenging ideas about everyday objects". But it is poor recycled stuff. Duchamp has a lot to answer for here. However, you then turn to something stylish and simple such as Claire Norcross's fluffy spiky pendant, made from the plastic tags used in industrial packaging (unusually for such objects, it's in production for Habitat); or Neil Austin's Cup Light - a sphere made of throwaway polystyrene cups. It's lovely, rather fragile-looking, probably not much good at illuminating anything, and the rivets and riveters will have cost a great deal more than the cups.
Lighting is one of those secondary applied arts that are perfectly at home in the V&A. Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture. Advances in 20th-century lighting were often ingenious and elegant (Anglepoise and Tizio lamps, twinkly halogen stars). But that's not what is on display here, and that's not the language that Pavitt or, presumably, the designers are using. Practically everything here aspires to the status of "modern art", and asks to be described and judged in its terms.
Most of the exhibits aren't industrial production or craft at all; they are tortuously made one-offs and you'll pay collectors' prices for them, especially the recycled numbers. It would be great if Bhs were to make some of these charming things by the thousand - your kids would love them - but I don't see it happening.
"Brilliant" is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7 (020 7942 2000) until 25 April
Peter York writes about advertising for the Independent
