When invited to 'marvel at the detail' in the Sunday Supplement offer for a ceramic plate or a furry animal, one is encouraged to want something unique and valuable and yet mass-produced. Clearly, there is a perceived demand for those things which allow one to demonstrate good taste and join an exclusive club, even though most aspirants have to settle for mass-produced stuff. Unless there exists an idea of the fake or copy, there can be no original. Allan McCollum wonders how you can enjoy those things that are "souvenirs of that class of people who manipulate history to your exclusion"; how art is treated rather than what is portrayed; how art is used to prop up notions of good taste without much thought. McCollum has joined those purveyors of taste, yet attempts to remain critical.

At the Serpentine there were four lines of production on view. McCollum has created archetypes of a kind which allow him to deal with notions of industrial production without just taking and elevating its best stuff, Koons or Steinbach fashion. Plaster Surrogates (1982/89) crowd in Salon-style around the first room; over two thousand different signs for a painting which claim a self-reference, not as painting pushed to the limit, but as something outside, connected to the world. They are what an artist might hang outside the studio as an indication of his or her activity, like an optician's outsize spectacles sign. McCollum's early attempts to achieve this were single-colour constructions which could too easily be confused with some reductive colourfield project. His decision to cast the whole thing in plaster, including frame, matt and "picture", results in a single, sealed object, each individual work acting as a sign for every painting. No two are ever the same; frame, matt colour and size vary in the creation of sufficient permutations to make the point. An artisanal mass-production, where every piece is unique, lies at the heart of McCollum's interest in exposing certain psychological and socio-economic models as being implicated in the marketing and possession of art. He has suggested that we fear mass-production, that it can be viewed as the result of people's desire to seem as productive as nature. The artist stands outside, possessing all the strength that machines do not; the artist as the epitome of the human.

By creating over ten thousand Individual Works (1987-88), McCollum has blurred differences, mixing up those elements of mass production (ten thousand being taken as the smallest number that comes close to industrial scale) and artistic responsibility (all the objects are different).

When television presents behaviour which indicates idealised wealth and and good taste art, for the most part, functions in the background. The Perpetual Photos (1982-89) are blow-ups of the background images: the painting on the wall at Ewing Oil, the art on show to show success. Once rephotographed and brought forward they become nothing more than an indistinct blur. At the Serpentine a booklet hung from a doorpost. It contained an original still from which the Perpetual Photos were taken and in most of them the paintings clearly resemble McCollum's Plaster Surrogates. Perfect Vehicles also turn up frequently on TV: a familiar Chinese vase shape which has become another sign.

Artists have, for some time, dealt with ideas of reiteration, either as a means to neutralize expression or to heighten one's perception of their devotion to authenticity. Recently, McCollum has been working on ways to achieve mass-produced unique drawings. These can now be added to the extant signs for the art that he intends to keep producing. As he has pointed out, 'a painting always has the identity of a painting. A painting is what it is because it is a convention.' With much of the work here, it is the point of attraction which completes the relationship between the viewer and the art.