Add to this cocktail of cognitive dissonance a joke – the pun on “tyre” – and you have a calculated insult. The Edinburgh councillor who fell into the trap of calling the tyres “junk, not art” must have got up the noses of bona- fide junk hunters everywhere.At least the proletariat can still be relied on to tell the difference. Newspapers are ever-alert to the plight of office cleaners unfairly scolded for chucking out junk art. Michael Landy’s garbage-can installation, zealously removed by night cleaners from Karsten Schubert’s London art gallery, was last month’s prize disposal. This month, a ball of detritus from a vacuum cleaner dust bag, extracted by the Japanese-German artist Suchan Kinoshita and exhibited in a show called “Stuff” by Jay Jopling, Damien Hirst’s gallerist, has been securely taped to the wall.Meanwhile, continental aesthetes flock to junk-art extravaganzas in the streets. And rich Italians, Germans, Belgians, Americans, even Swiss, attend London auctions to bid six-figure sums for the work of European junk artists whose names are virtually unknown to the British: Burri, Beuys, Schwitters, Klein.

This week, Christie’s was offering for an estimated pounds 80,000-pounds 120,000 a picture dated 1958 consisting of scuffed white kaolin – the stuff surgeons use to encase broken limbs The artist was an Italian, Piero Manzoni (d.1963). Name rings a bell? Yes, this was the same outrageous chancer who, decades before last year’s bowel movement by Gilbert and George, filled 90 cans with his own excrement and sold them as art – each priced at its weight in gold.The few Brits who remember Manzoni may execrate him, but on the continent he occupies an important art-historical niche. He was a follower of Alberto Burri (d.1995), an Italian army surgeon who made abstract pictures from gory-looking, neatly sutured sacking, in an attempt to exorcise his traumatic wartime experience. Nothing effete about that, or the prices his work fetches – a European collector paid an astonishing pounds 804,500 for a big Burri sack picture at Sotheby’s, London, a year ago. Such prices belie the name given to the junk-art movement that Burri inspired – arte povera.It was not fringe or underground.

It was mainstream fine art, the dominant artistic movement on the continent in the Sixties and early Seventies. At the time, we Brits were being presented with trendy, more easily digested American-inspired pop art, full of familiar, homespun images from the worlds of popular music and advertising.Which helps to explain why junk art has never been our cup of tea. British art history has no Burri, no Duchamps – whose found objects, over 80 years ago, let loose the mocking, conceptualist genie of Dadaism.Nor did we spawn a Robert Rauschenberg, whose splattery “combine paintings” in America in the Fifties, using junk ranging from postcards to a stuffed goat, mirrored Dada’s subversiveness. It was he who gave the shortest summary of junk art’s agenda – to bridge the gap between Art and Life That is why his works contain bits of life. That is, junk.The Brits’ most explosive encounter with junk art came in 1943 when the Allies, inadvertently complying with Hitler’s wish to exterminate “degenerate” art, bombed to smithereens the German Kurt Schwitters’ home in Hanover, a junk-jammed Dadaist interior that he called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery.