Just how dangerous can a dead cow be?

FOURTEEN years or so ago, a girlfriend and I went to the National Theatre to see a preview of a new play by Howard Brenton. I can't recall why we went, although the cheap tickets must have been a motivating factor; it certainly wasn't because we suspected that what we were about to see was going to fill newspapers for months on end. The play was called The Romans in Britain, and I was vaguely shocked - not by the content, the jokes about buggery and the obscenities about the Queen, but because nobody had complained about it. I felt out of touch: if I were a right-wing bigot, I thought, I'd be kicking up a hell of a fuss about this. Why are they all so quiet? Is Britain really this tolerant now? When did that happen? The next afternoon, however, the play made the front page of the London Evening Standard, Mary Whitehouse started firing on all cylinders, and all was right with the world. I felt almost relieved.

Once every decade and a half, it seems, my finger unwittingly finds itself resting on the cultural pulse, which is a pretty poor success rate for a columnist, but there you go - you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, etc. Two Sundays ago, this household went to see the Open Exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery, and I got those old Romans in Britain blues again. Why had we heard nothing about this? How come a man can paint (or whatever it was he did) two pictures of the events surrounding the murder of James Bulger, and exhibition organisers can hang these paintings (or whatever they are) among the usual old tosh, shirts still in their Cellophane wrappers, ping-pong bats with lights on them (really) and the rest, and no one says a word? I hadn't realised that we were attending the exhibition on its opening day, and that many words would be said over the next couple of weeks; this time around, I found that I could participate much more directly in the moral panic.

Many of us feel vaguely uneasy about contemporary art. I would imagine that, like me, a fair percentage of Independent on Sunday readers have some kind of vague splodge stuck up on a wall somewhere, something tasteful and abstract that you don't really 'understand' but like the look of anyway, and that is as modern as you're prepared to get. As yet, you haven't (and this is pure guesswork, but indulge me) splashed out on a Damien Hirst formaldehyde cow, or a pair of foetus earrings; on the other hand, you feel you should violently dislike the people who violently dislike dead cows and foetus earrings. People who are anti-modern are objectionable, and though we have no time or taste for bricks, cows, contemporary music performed on Hoovers and so on, we have even less time for the people who whinge about them. If we do feel disapproval, we either ignore it, or put on an ironical Alf Garnett voice to articulate it: 'S'all blardy rubbish, innit?'

I don't have very strong views on the cows or the earrings or the shirts or the ping-pong bats. I don't know how my writing career will pan out, but I know I have neither the desire nor the facility (in other words, I'm not clever enough) to write something that I fear people will be unable to understand; I don't like music that doesn't have a tune, and I avoid films that don't have a plot. All this, I think, disqualifies me from spouting about any form of experimental art. But I do have strong views about the James Bulger pictures in the Whitechapel: I think they are stupid and offensive.

I don't know many artists, and I certainly don't know anyone who would devote hours of their time to recreating that terrible image of a little boy being led out of a shopping mall. Do you? And if you did, wouldn't you say something to him, like, what the hell do you think you're doing? And what kind of berk would look at these pictures and decide that they should be hanging in a public gallery, each for sale at more than pounds 2,000 and captioned, inexplicably and unforgivably, 'Cartoon for modern tapestry'?

This is what worries me about contemporary art: not that I don't understand it, but that the people who create and show it (or rather, this guerrilla faction of it) are so different from normal people. They seem to have no friends or advisers who raise grounded moral objections to what they do; anyone who attacks them they dismiss as reactionary. There are many, many reasons why I could never have painted or shown those pictures, but one of them is that nobody I know would have let me - they've all got too much sense and taste. Jamie Wagg, the artist, now says that he intended the Bulger pictures as a memorial to the little boy; for the first time that I can recall, a contemporary artist has had to explain what his work means, and what a ham- fisted job he has made of it. Perhaps we now know all we need to about his school of art.

The idea that art should be dangerous and unsettling is both pernicious and hilariously precious. How can a painting or a CD be dangerous, unless you throw it at someone's head? Drunk driving is dangerous; even trying to put up curtain hooks while standing on a wobbly chair is dangerous. But writing a book, or making some noise on a guitar . . ? And yet 'dangerous' is now the highest tribute a critic can pay to an artist, which is why so many of them spend so much time producing offensive and provocative work: it is their duty to awaken us from our bourgeois slumbers. Meanwhile we sleep on, stirring only to tell them to shut up every once in a while.

How about this for an alternative philosophy: all art should comfort and cheer. Forget about William Burroughs and Damien Hirst, and let's hear it for P G Wodehouse and Smokey Robinson and Sergeant Bilko. In Preston Sturges's great film Sullivan's Travels, a director of comedy films decides he wants to make heavy social realist dramas, until he spends some time in prison and comes to appreciate the true spiritual value of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. As an argument, this is unbeatable; only those with time on their hands and themselves on their minds can find danger in a piece of theatre or a couple of white shirts. Go on, say you hate it and it's banal and shallow: you'll feel better for it.-