Schizophrenic, megalomanic, amoral, lazy, wasteful, unoriginal, derivative, boring, misogynistic, egocentric, unimaginative, unoriginal, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive - you've been hypnotised, hoodwinked and brainwashed. You've been Picassoed by all the branded goods in the gallery shop. Are you bereted in it or buried by it?

Don't talk, don't write, don't even think, just draw and paint. Just make Art. Live art. Don't talk about love, don't write about love, don't think about love, just make love like Picasso loves the art of the past.

The written word is obsolete. Painting is only about the paint, ability is about mastery of technique. Subject and content are irrelevant. The medium is no more and no less than the medium, it is Only the medium, only art can become Art. And much that might be Art is merely artifice. Drink and drive and paint like Jackson Pollock, but with seat belts and  air bags. Live your art to live, not to drive us all to death.

When Picasso refers to himself on canvas is he engaging in an inanimate, aesthetic dialectic with his alter ego or merely pursuing a megalomanic dominance over his peers. Familial norms are amorally ignored as he serially or concurrently pursues oppressive and unequal relationships with women many times decades younger than he. But that exploitation of women might simply be symptomatic of his immaturity, an ageing figure imprisoning an eternally adolescent sexuality. Perhaps these were just the acceptable manners of the time and the place. But were all his muses amused all of the time.

Communism was to Picasso attractive in that way, subordinating intelligent individuality for the anonymous and un-negotiable bullying of the herd. Blind group-think and team-building imposing one style of power over the powerless, those who submitted mindlessly to him. Peace was an honourable ambition and a rejection of Franco and war causes with which I can concur. I never entered Spain until after Franco was gone. But I never entered the Soviet Union until after Stalin and a good many more were gone too.

Yet much that is understood in comparing Picasso's re-workings of others' compositions is that their only merit is in that Picasso kept his cubist graffiti on canvas but had less originality and panache than Banksy whose graffiti occasionally surpasses the urban decadence within which it is situated and enters the mysterious world of the art sale rooms. Art from demolition sites knocked down by the auctioneer's hammer at bankrupt stock sale prices.

Ernst Gombrich peddled a continental European viewpoint of Picasso but our generation had been spared such traumas of Russia, Germany, Italy and Spain and instead was culturally monopolised by the post-war American modern artists. Much of Europe was ravaged by wars and revolutions but our generation have lived all our lives free of war, at least within our own borders, in insular English ways, building our own brands of art and music, of fashion and design and exporting them all around the world.

Herbert Read ended up in the battles on French soil, born in Victorian times too many decades and monarchs intervene between our experiences. He was another part of the history itself rather than the present and the future by which we directed our own artistic endeavours.

My own experience of Paris and the Picasso Exhibition in the mid 1960s was of electricity and transport strikes, bread cheese and wine and endless walking. Does France and Paris go on strike every time they have a Picasso exhibition for a reason. Mai '68, now '09.

But what did Picasso contribute to the Mai '68 movement? From Mougins it seems nothing at all, for example - Autour de La Celestine: Collation au Jardin avec Jeune Bacchus Gras ­ but why were you not at Nanterre or the Sorbonne. You contributed nothing to the greatest artistic movement of the century in its hour of need. Where were your prints at l'Ecole des Beaux Arts delivered via le pavé, the barricades and through the lines of police. You didn't visit us in London either. We had our own artists and print makers leaving our marks and remarks for art in history.

In more recent years a small exhibition at The Barbican in London of Picasso's photography and films made a refreshing impact though not quite enough to replace the massif of prejudice and irritation with which his life's work had dulled his achievements in my mind's eye.

Even the Picasso Museum in Barcelona tended to reinforce my suspicions as to the poverty of his genres and excessiveness of his energies repetitively expended.

And now we are assailed by the present second-hand exhibition cast off from Paris and hanging in The National Gallery Sainsbury Wing on floor Minus Two. I hadn't previously seen work on these cavernous cellar walls. No natural light, walls that meet at odd angles, non-cuboidal. Had the architects forgotten their 3:4:5 triangle makes for right angles and that the topsy-turvy world of Cubism is an unsettling experience when the room itself is competing with the display. One 'carbuncle' at a time is enough, I hope I am permitted to adopt the new Carolingian vernacular.

The five odd rooms are overcrowded. Look across and you are confronted by a sea of bobbing heads as art lovers bill and coo, obstructing each other's view. Two eyes in the normal places on their faces are not enough, Picasso at least got that right. Eyes on the back of the head would have helped, or a periscope maybe and an arty eye in each fingertip, but that might be too sur-real even for viewing Picasso. Just by moving the whole hanging line seventy-centimetres up the cavernous walls would allow us all to stand back and have clear sight lines to all the work. I won't even mention the tonally equivalent red and grey used for the titles of the curators' notes causing one and all to walk forward, eyes screwed up in the artificial light to read. Walls painted in fashionable lobotomy grey. No cure for brain death inflicted by an overdose of drab curation.

The audio-tour generation too introverted to talk to real people, hardly interacting with the art itself but addicted to their eye-hand co-ordination exercises. Tap in the number, listen to the pre-digested opinions from the captive flock of caged art historians. Swallow it all up like disgorged high protein food supplements. Vomit back the strangulated tones of the undigestible Christopher Riopelle. Relax in the seductively mellifluous accent of Anne Robbins. An hour in the dentist's chair listening to her pretty voice would dull all the pain. But three hours of Picasso was all I could take before I crawled out from the torture chamber of cellar Minus Two and back into the battleground of Trafalgar Square.

The exhibition is a reiteration of hypothetical contrivances juxtaposed in curatorial covens embellished with essays unfounded in experience in the making of art, merely the arranging and elaborating of inconsequential discourses by the visually, technically and creatively illiterate. The visual arts can speak for themselves. Certainly Picasso could speak for himself. Though even Picasso had the sense to rarely say much about his own creativity except through the demonstration of the visual media themselves, here represented essentially though not exclusively through paint on canvas.

Yet those four cardboard maquettes: bathing woman, seated woman, seated man resting on his elbow and the fourth piece, stole the show. (Oh that someone could have stolen all the rest.) I suspect that the large scale concrete figures produced in 1964 at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, have lost the spontaneity of these cardboard cut-outs. When the next generation of rioters have destroyed enough of the massive blocks of apartments designed by Le Corbusier perhaps Picasso's four cardboard figures could be interpreted anew in the Bois de Boulogne, in rough cast concrete and taller than the Eiffel Tower.

I heard that there was controversy when Picasso was hanging next to the old masters in the Louvre.

I don't know Elizabeth Cowling but she has three columns and a huge photo of Picasso in his studio in her article in the Sunday Times culture section for his exhibition. She says he was 'contemptuous of intellectualism' - how can I agree more with my bête noir 'Monsieur' Picasso? She says he would 'give the whole of Italian painting for the Vermeer of Delft'. And I would give the whole of Picasso just for Vermeer's 'the girl with the pearl ear ring'. Touché. Apparently he was susceptible to 'ideal beauty in art' - but I think he made a bit of a pig's ear of that, or should a Spanish matador actually be having a bull's ear of it!

At last I find that he has a hidden truth in saying that 'If a work of art cannot always live in the present, it must not be considered at all.' So he permits us to consign him to history and not consider it at all. Thanks Pablo, I should have understood you were right all along.

My favourite art critic (after an anonymous French art historian at the Sorbonne) is Waldemar Januszczak and he also devotes several columns and two photos to analysing creativity through the medium of this same Picasso exhibition. He asks 'What is it to create?' Thankyou WJ - I always ask that same question of intellectuals and wordsmiths. By the way, that programme you made about Gauguin was fantastic, I watched it over and over. Don't think of wasting your breath on Picasso. Gauguin was a real artist as you are a real art critic.

Critics, historians and curators all, show me your own portfolio of personal artworks or works of art and I will then peruse your prose. I don't care if you do or you don't look at my artwork and I'm not bothered to write excuses offering their raison d'être. The Picasso exhibition is a pain without reason. There's more art in the spirals of a pain au raisins. Just fill your gullets and choke on the completely fathomless ramblings of Jacques Rancière if you so wish, try The Politics of Aesthetics for entré.

Did I really have to go to yet another Picasso exhibition? Maybe they have a beautiful organic and recyclable shopping bag with a fragment of Picasso iconography printed on the sides so that I can appear cultured and green. Or a computer mouse mat with . . . what a relief, no mats in sight. Yet too bad, more of the same, a mug for every mug, a DVD unfit for purpose ­ the academic soundtrack read without understanding of pronunciation. I want my money back please. How facile and puerile.

All major art exhibitions are now reduced to recycling canvases as reproductions converted into shopping bags: Bacon at Tate Britain, Popova at Tate Modern (I was nearly seduced into buying that one!), Axél Gallén at the National Gallery along with Monet and van Gogh. No doubt something else at the British Museum like the Rosetta Stone. Now recycled matelot shirts do for Picasso at the National Gallery. Knick-knacks galore! What's your favourite colour? Orange! Thankyou Lady Sov, come along and kick la merde out of this exhibition with me. Bring on the dancing girls, the onion sellers and the Beaujolais Nouveau. The art plonkers won't notice the difference between cheap plonk and a top pinot noir.

Throw these traders out of the temple of high art, bring in the living art and the living artists. Consign Picasso's hoard to its own dusty, cluttered salon in purgatory, not far to go down to level Minus Three of the Sainsbury Wing? A new meaning for landfill.

Where is the 21st Century Art ­ try the National Portrait Gallery and the annual portraiture competition. Where will 22nd Century Art be after this. But don't insult us with the Turner Prize. I would give all Picasso's work and the 2008 Turner Prize just for J M W Turner's 'Air, Steam and Speed ­ the Great Western Railway (1844)'. That is a truly great application of paint to canvas. Picasso was not a great artist, more an art historian with paint brush obsessing with others' themes and works. A monochromatic magpie.  Plagiarism to such a degree would devalue an academic degree. Yet the Faculties of Art History and Critical Studies have abandoned their critical faculties. They can neither see nor participate in original thought, merely mumbling the doctrine amongst themselves, safe in the herd.

Better than that, go buy the materials and make art not words. A picture may be worth a thousand words but rarely do a thousand words make a decent picture. Take your typewriters and laptops to London Zoo and let the monkeys write the new biblical commentaries for Picasso. Now a little hush please, and close the atelier door behind you when you leave. I'm going to paint myself into a corner, and sit there reading Françoise Gilot's 'Life with Picasso'. She seems to be a beautiful person and in an exhibition putting her work beside Pablo Picasso's there is every chance that she would win the competition for our hearts with uplifting, modest, colourful and livable works of art. The nature of her humanity would outshine him. She clearly contributed immensely to his life and work, oh that he could have done better by her. Nazi Germany may have banned his work - but just look at the mediocrity of Adolf Hitler's painting.

Picasso's dachshund Lump encapsulates in one iconic form his master's body dysmorphic syndrome which he transfers to all his renditioned muses disfigured in his works. Picasso and Lump, another irresponsible dog owner leaving le chier-en-lit. Please clean up after your dog.

"Picasso ­ challenging the past" ­ been there, seen that, didn't buy the matelot shit, sorry, excuse my typo, matelot shirt. I didn't buy the tee-shirt striped bag.

I tried ear-wigging in on conversations, listening to others' comments. And I watched the serendipitous relationship between the paintings and the gallery visitors.

The first conversation I heard was about Guernica, which was of course not on display. Eyes open but not seeing.

Then a well presented red-head paused and posed and passed in front of the 1906 Nude of Picasso's mistress Fernande Olivier. Ah, the power of art putting such ideas in my head. Mistress or nude, which is the naughtier fantasy. Nude red-head of course.

I chatted to a man who was energetically sketching in his pad, he was from Liverpool. He had been a photographer but was now turning to art instead of digital photography. This is interesting since I find one of the most tantalizing paintings in The National Gallery is of Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche. Delaroche's comment on hearing of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niepce in the 1820s and 1830s inventing photography, daguerreotypes, was to come home to me in the exhibition entitled "From today painting is dead", at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 16 March-14 May 1972. Picasso died in 1973, so there you have it.

In another room the 1955 Portrait of Jacqueline in Turkish Costume had an uncanny resemblance in the gallery attendant seated nearby.

And the 1969 Head of a Musketeer was at first obscured by a woman standing face to face with it. She turned to walk away with disarmingly thick lensed glasses, pursed lips, concave lined cheeks and a quizzical expression so like the musketeer.

In the room of Models and Muses: Nudes - a lecturer-like/lecher-like man (enunciate more clearly please) was overpowering a petite Asian student as he waved his hands expansively about the vast naked bodyscape of the figure of Jacqueline Roque. He eloquently expounded that 'I think he ran out of canvas.' ­ poor student, she had to agree. He didn't mention Goya's Naked Maja in the Prado.

Next to this was another 1964 painting of a Reclining Nude with a Cat. In front of it stood a voluptuous young woman, not quite yet morbidly but still almost fashionably obese wearing a boldly hooped black and grey cashmere tricot. She was poured into her shrunk-in-the-bath-to-fit hipster jeans, a glistening clammy muffin-top of a midriff punctuated by kidney dimples. Crinkly black hair cascading onto her shoulders. All this accentuated by her black, seven inch stiletto heels as she pirouetted away from the Jacqueline Roque. Lucien Freud might analyse the composition while Sigmund Freud might analyse me! Lead me to the couch.

But who will analyse Picasso? In the exhibition of lino-cut prints accompanying this exhibition there is a series of Nude Women at the Spring. Apparently the motif is appropriated from Edouard Manet's 'Luncheon on the Grass' (le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe./le Bain). But Picasso's fluent line inflates the female form mischievously juxtaposing her blubbery limb holding a single cut flower's petals to the pursed lip line of her vagina. The printer's technical contribution is 'tirage terminé'. End of the run. And so with that thought I will end this, and run, to challenge the future.

© Brian Marsh, London  27 February 2009. initiative.cafe@btinternet.com