Let me speak frankly: There are disruptors and Disruptors (notice I use a small and capital d to distinguish them from each other). The latter being the real deal, the former, pale reflections of the sun. These pale moons tend to waltz in, break the rules and with out fully understanding their own motivations for doing so, submit themselves to the hedonistic temptation of destruction and chaos. By rejecting the essential rules, it's extremely easy to fall into mediocrity. To shock just for the sake of it, or perhaps for the sake of wild success that may come from it.

Experimentation is a great thing but one must learn all the rules before they get broken. Nothing is more inexcusable for an artist than being lazy and masking it under the charlatan slogan "we're making art!" Salvador Dali is a great example, a master painter (Velazquez was his hero) who embraced cubism, expressionism and many other styles before settling on perhaps the greatest art performance the 20th century had every seen. Surrealism is Dali and Dali is surrealism, everyone pales in comparison.

As a schoolboy, I was completely obsessed with Dali. I would take his biography with me everywhere from lesson to lesson, a huge red tome with his famous anti-Nietzschean moustache pointing upwards with those familiar little daisies attached to each end. Nearly every single teacher who picked up that red book hated him with a distasteful satisfaction, it seemed to stir something within their subconscious that disturbed them. "A cheat, terrible draughtsman" said one, "Too many mushroom pies" said another. Looking back, it would have been terribly entertaining to bring alongside Dali, Hans Bellmer, that would have really cooked their noodle!

With his midday lit deserted beaches, Dali used his art and fiction to speak truth and reached far beyond the simplistic labels given to him by the snobbish northern European and American intelligentsia, who still to this day regard him with a weird sense of disapproval. The very rich collected his work whilst the great unwashed masses marvelled him!

But perhaps the most controversial disruptor to mention, the one who shoves the stacks of cards up in the air (or the tables for the matter), was Jesus Christ. Yes, he knew all the Judaic rules by heart but he re-wrote them and communicated truth to his followers via beautiful fictional stories, known to us as parables. I have always been convinced that a fictional image or story is a lot closer to reality than a so called documentary photograph a la Maxim Gorky.

So the capital D Disruptor must first and foremost master his own brush, pen or camera, and once he has done that, he must be able to break those rules and surpass them again. Otherwise, he would be called a cheat.