Howard Jacobson: Mr Beckham's light went out in his head -and the rest, as they say, was silence

A host of glittering prize ceremonies on television last week, the highlight of which, for me, was David Beckham winning the Not Very Much Personality of the Year Award, otherwise known as the Turner prize. Say what you like, the sight of that light going on and off in Beckham's head was profoundly moving.

Of course there were the usual knockers. Those who claimed any old fool could look unilluminated and then not, unilluminated and then not, unilluminated and then not. To which my response is – so go ahead and try it! Harder than you think, eh? Besides which, why this privileging of difficulty? The art critic Madonna said it all when she reminded us that silliness was of the essence, so long as it was redeemed by love and a cheque for £20,000.

I know that many people would have preferred Madonna not to have motherfucked before the watershed, but hey, what's a line for if you're not going to cross it. Watershed, goalmouth – who cares so long as the ball transgresses and goes over. And to those who complain about the amount of conceptual violation and minimalist trespass on our television screens, I say this: no one makes you watch Match of the Day – change channels if you don't like it.

And no more asking for wherefores. Why should Beckham have to explain why there's a light going on and off in his head? If he could describe in words what makes him tick, and then tock, he wouldn't need to do it on the field would he? He could speak a pass. He could say a free-kick. He could enunciate a goal. Leave the guy to be inchoate in peace. He does what he does. The rest is silence.

It was Hamlet, one of the two patron saints of minimalist art, who first said that, the other being Iago, famous for the gnomic utterance: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know." I once tried to write a play about the dying Hamlet meeting the lip-sealed Iago, but the dialogue wouldn't come, the way it won't at the Turner prize.

The rest is silence. You know the procedure: you do your work – that's to say you get someone else to do your work – you win the prize, you agree it's silly, you deliver yourself of a whinny of inane mirth, then you declare yourself unable to answer questions. "If I could tell you in words what my work is about," you say, "I wouldn't have needed to make art in the first place."

To which a reasonable man might rejoin: "But by denying me a sensual object, by refusing to paint or sculpt me a thing, isn't 'telling' precisely all you have done?"

Were you as witty as you would like to be, you would say in return: "In that case you have what you want, for you cannot fairly expect an explanation of an explanation." But you are not as witty as you would like to be, and your medium is silence. You take cover in the conviction that an artist's work is sufficient unto itself, and is completed by that deep resounding reticence which is the soul of creative endeavour.

This idea of art gets its arrogance from the example of God. Though decidedly not a conceptual artist – for He made something of nothing rather than the other way round – the Judaeo-Christian Creator none the less rested from His labours once He considered them complete, and refused to take questions.

Did He put those two lights in the firmament in order to balance His composition? No answer. Did He create the great whales because He feared His canvass somehow lacked mass without them? No answer. What He did was good. That was the only concession to aesthetic discourse He allowed Himself. "Good." The rest is sil- ence and a wet kiss from Madonna.

I'm not averse to artists feeling godlike myself. Or at least I'm not averse to some artists feeling godlike. If you've covered caves with the exhaustive pictorial narrative of your nation's way of life, or told the story of creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, you have a right to take a leaf from the Almighty's book, rest on the seventh day and give no interviews. Insistence on the irreducibility of the work of art, however, dates from more recent times when artists were altogether less certain of their function.

Some inverse ratio of grandiosity to performance seems to be at work here. As your usefulness recedes, as your once great purpose dwindles to baffling the staid with your facetiousness and goading the solemn with your footling, so the claims you make for your artistic sovereignty become more preposterous. Never was so little art of worth produced, yet never have art and the artist had such magical properties ascribed to them. In an empty world, the wizardry of the minimalist, like the wizardry of Harry Potter, deludes the kids into believing that they are watching plenitude.

There is, of course, no reason why an artist should be an adequate critic of his work. And it's true that art will always frustrate our attempts to possess it discursively. But that does not mean it suffers in our curiosity and conversation. Hamlet has had enough of talk, having talked himself to a standstill, but he goes on looking to Horatio to prolong his story. Much has happened – carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts. "All this," promises Horatio, "can I truly deliver."

The minimalist artist means to deliver nothing. Fair enough. But nothing will come of nothing. Sheltering in muteness after an event that is already mute is merely the mystification of nothingness.