Art Monitor: Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley

East London, I mean, really. It simply is too dreadful sometimes. You head to Maureen Paley to check out the latest show from Wolfgang Tillmans, one of contemporary photography's biggest names. And what? You want to look at the snaps? You fucking idiot. No, no, no. This is the private view mate. That means you get to view in public what people really should only ever wear in private.

Let's be clear here. This is not about the art. This is a freakshow, pure and simple. Like a night at the Joiners but with free booze and no drugs. And it's all over by 8.30. In the evening. I mean I probably should know better by now, but I wasn't prepared for quite such a horde of ridiculous people.

There was somebody who looked like a fat trendy version of Boris Johnson in super-short denim shorts and black patent lace-ups, a middle-aged woman dressed as some kind of witch, with a tall black hat and Matrix shades, guys in glittery jackets, guys in hotpants and thigh-length socks... It's the middle of the afternoon for Christ's sake. In an art gallery. There might as well have been leaping leprechauns and coked-up dwarfs: nobody would have noticed. Westwood was spattered everywhere, like some orb-logoed brown-buttoned rash. Not one but two people who looked like Philip Normal were there, an even fatter version of Scottee, and that bloke from Bloc Party – was it actually him? I have no idea.

But being a devoted critic with the interests of my readers at heart, I couldn't just stand outside in the fresh air with a bottle of lager and a cigarette. Oh no. Brave the sc(r)um. In again. The photos. Ground floor: a massive selection of Tillmans' work from over the years all jumbled up together with no thematic or chronological arrangement. No frames, just sellotaped to the bare white walls. Some of the stuff here really does show his brilliance, and the arrangement actually works too. There's a massive black and white image of sleeping dogs alongside little snapshots of people having fun, and pieces from 2006's melancholically beautiful paper drop series next to the innovative Lighter works of the following year.

Upstairs: some early video works. There's one that shows some peas boiling in a pan and another featuring a pan-pipe version of the Scorpions' Wind of Change. 'Well, this is fucking boring,' opined my companion. These works are kind of boring if one expects narrative, but they work on their own terms as moving photographs: the one with a snail crawling over somebody's hand is particularly great. Tillmans' work is just so exquisitely detailed, his techniques so versatile and innovative. No two series look the same, but his best stuff is characterized by a humanity and depth of feeling that is very much absent from the assembled throng.

Henry Holland turned up a bit later on, shorn of Her ubiquitous Agyness, but was probably intimidated by the gang of wacko outfits with even less creativity than him. So he promptly left and made a bee-line for the relative sanity of Vyner Street. And when Vyner Street is a safe-haven from ridiculousness, you know that something truly terrible has happened. Ashcroft was right: the idiots are winning.