This dark mood is maintained in other selections. Aida Ruilova’s undated Untitled Drawing depicts a tiny squinting face oozing blood as a hand is stuffed unceremoniously into its mouth, suggesting torture, self-inflicted or otherwise. Nobuyoshi Araki’s Polaroid photo of women in Bondage communicate a similar moral ambiguity. In incongruously rich, painterly colour the notorious Japanese voyeur makes a visual syntax of pain and pleasure, an always shifting, never comfortable balance of power. One suspects that Houellebecq and Miller, both often dismissed as pornographers would approve. Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Black Butterfly) (2003), a heavy pencil drawing of radiating lines representing a pair of unfolding wings, seems a much gentler affair, but you’d never know it to read Bradley’s neo-Gothic eulogy, “Beauty transcending beauty”, he gushes; ‘Black Dawn’.

It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter Mat Collishaw’s video Blind Date (1995) in such a context, and its pairing with Christian Marclay’s Blind Television (Hitachi) (2000) makes a deal of sense. In Collishaw’s Bauysian home movie the artist takes a E-ed up, slightless trip to the Prado in Madrid. After removing his blindfold only to gaze for a few awestruck seconds at Diego Velaquez’ Las Meninas (1656), he heads home to London a changed man perhaps. In Marclay’s simple but effective intervention the screen of a corner-mounted TV has been replaced by a mirror, the sound plays on, but we see onlyu a felection of the gallery interior and our own gawking selves. Both works exploit our habitual privileging of the sense of sigh, playing with ideas  about the value of the image, the aura of the unique work aof art and the pervasive influence of the mass media.

Another still closer double act is performed by Martin Kippenberger and Jay Batlle. Kippenberger’s Untitled (Mencey Hotel, Spain) (1988) is a cartoonish ink sketch of a rearing horse being urged into battle by its rider. Batlle’s Place Like This Hate People Like You (2003-4) is a copy of the same work made of different stationery (from Château Marmont) and inserted into a copy of the late German artist’s NO DRAWING, NO CRY, a collection published after his death. The tribute is an odd one, clearly heartfelt but unafraid to obscure its ostensible subject’s own work in favour of a naturally imperfect imitation. As he has demonstrated with Factory Archives and again, more recently, with the Kurt Cobain homage Phantom Release (2003), Bradley’s attitude towards the idolization of creative individuals is, rightly, an ambivalent one. The fascination of Curtis and Cobain is that they were gunning for culture and yet were gunned down by it; assassins assassinated.