In 2001, when Martin Creed won the Turner Prize and exhibited a work that was nothing but a light going on and off in a room, a great public groan was heard throughout the land. I didn’t have to write about the event, and I didn’t see the show, so I didn’t form an opinion about it.

Since then, I’ve seen two Creed light pieces in Seattle, or rather, two different editions of the same piece on display in two locations. The two displays overlapped for two days this past weekend.

One was the tasseled, somewhat ornate lamp in the Henry Art Gallery’s Mouth Open, Teeth Showing exhibition. The show, which closed yesterday, was a selection of works from the Bill and Ruth True Collection, and the Creed lamp sat in the miniature rotunda on the southwest side of the Henry’s ground-floor gallery, flicking yellow light on and off.

The other was a quiet little bluish-tinged nightlight plugged into an outlet near the floor in the front room of Western Bridge. It’s part of the new show Insubstantial Pageant Faded (well, well worth seeing), which opened to the public Friday, and which also is a selection from the True collection. (The Trues are major donors to the Henry, and own Western Bridge.)

Both pieces, the lamp and the nightlight, are the same work: Creed’s Work No. 312 (A lamp going on and off), not to be confused with Work No. 227 (The lights going on and off)—the work that made headlines back in 2001. The Trues own the piece, and they checked with Creed’s gallery to make sure they could borrow “another edition” for the short overlapping days, WB director Eric Fredericksen said.

Neither of the works moved me much, or sent my head spinning. I suppose I could have interpreted plenty into those little lamps, and into their themed-group-show and architectural contexts, but in the end, they didn’t stand out; they didn’t produce any commitment in me.

Whereas I can imagine that if a Creed light work is alone in a gallery, it is much more confrontational, and also suffers more from the pressure to bring something fresh to the conversation about the nature and history of art.

(This, ultimately, must be the difference between the “light” and the “lamp” works. And certainly there is a meaningful difference between a light and its lamp—maybe somewhere there’s a good interview with Creed on this. For the record, the lamp pieces were different because Creed doesn’t specify which type of lamp must be used. The recent Seattle pairing makes a nice display of this principle.)

Boston Globe short-timer Ken Johnson (who’s returning to the New York Times soon) recently had that very experience, of facing one of Creed’s lights alone in a gallery. For him, the work was a rebel without a cause. Or at least without the expected, revolutionary cause.

When Yves Klein did an exhibition in Paris in 1958 called “Le Vide” (“The Void”) that consisted only of a completely empty gallery, it was shocking for most people but an inspirational sign of artistic and social freedom for a few. If an art exhibition could be nothing but an empty gallery, then anything was possible. The cultural revolutions of the ’60s were soon to come. Half a century later, an exhibition consisting of nothing but the gallery lights going on and off excites no such utopian euphoria. It’s more like high-brow business as usual. Is this what Creed means us to take from his work? The thought that art’s cutting edge is no longer moving forward but going in circles, producing only more or less amusing variations on established precedents? If so, is “The Lights Going On and Off” a critique of contemporary culture, a gesture of despair, or a wake-up call?

I’m not sure what Johnson means about “a critique of contemporary culture” (which culture: pop, high, low?), but there is a good case to be made for “The Lights Going On and Off” as a gesture of despair as well as a wakeup call. A wakeup call for who or what? Art and its initiates, Johnson seems to be saying. (Interestingly, Johnson distinguishes between “most people” and “a few” in his telling of the Klein story; in the Creed version, he seems to be saying that even the “few”—with him as the representative member—find Creed’s light weary.)

The idea is a reversal. It’s not that the work is so radical that it’s upsetting, but that it’s a conservative agent for mocking the radical in order to mobilize disgust toward it. (Or to mobilize disgust for art insiders unwilling to see the cliches of radicalism for what they are.) (Note: Creed is a specialist in disgust. The last piece I saw by him before the lamp pieces was his video of people shitting and vomiting.)

Is even that critical project new? I’m not convinced.

But I am, as ever, convinced by Ken Johnson’s writing, which always, elegantly, provides momentum in any discussion. Here’s the whole review.