UNDER THE MICROSCOPE : Why arty-babble is so misleading

I REJECT the accusation that I am a philistine. Though I do admit to be planning a guide to France for the culture-fatigued which would include ways to avoid stopping to inspect every single ancient, as well as not so ancient, church or abbey. In my defence I claim a passion for Paul Klee and have put a Kandinsky on the cover of two of my books. But there is a limit to my tolerance for artistic hokum.

When I was in the modern art museum in Amsterdam last week I burst out laughing in front of one of the paintings in a large exhibition of Imi Knoebel. I had recently enjoyed the play Art which revolves around one of three friends having bought, for an enormous price, a painting that was just white. Much fun is made of his choice in the play - but here was the painting in front of my eyes. This white canvas was entitled Jena Paintings VI. The artist had as his teacher Malevich, who had also painted white on white; and indeed I believe that there are other plain white paintings around.

The catalogue disturbed me. It spoke of Knoebel's ability to combine images into energetic fields, condensing the tension and energy of colour and also "fusing the material and the immaterial, the banal and the spiritual and the tangibility of bodies and surface with inconceivable beauty". I had already been sensitised to such pretentious nonsense by another exhibit.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in a darkened room was a large sausage-shaped white object that jerked about a bit, and onto which some abstract images were projected. There was a notice to explain it all. "A `gnomon' is a device for knowing. This installation is about not knowing. That is the paradox and irony at the heart of the GNOMON... By presenting the viewer with an object that acts almost as if it were an animate being, full of the repulsion and attraction that another person or animal can evoke, and then setting this `blob' loose in the rectilinear space of a gallery devoted to architecture and design, these artist call into question the nature of our knowledge of the world around us. Things don't sit still. Things may not even be things, but beings" and so on and on.

If one treats all this as a poetic response to the art it could, I suppose, be acceptable. But when taken as a description of the real world or an attempt at understanding it, I have to classify it as arty-babble. It has pretensions to describing the world in a manner approaching science, and that is quite misleading. If one transformed each of the explanations of the GNOMON into its negative, it would make just as much "sense".

All this raises the issue as to how to judge art. It is so very different from science. The key feature of science is peer review. Scientific communication is based on publication in journals and each paper is subject to review and revision. This can be a very painful process as, for example when our beloved and hard-won ideas and experiments are shown to have more defects than one would like to accept.

When refereeing a paper there is the obligation to see that the experiments have been correctly carried out and that conclusions are justified. It also needs to be judged in relation to what is already known - is it a novel contribution, merely confirmatory, or just plain boring?

What I find so hard to understand are those who think that there is something basically similar between art and science. This is very clear from the process of selection. In science, practising scientists are the judges. In art it is done by a quite different group, not artists but those who run galleries or museums, and includes critics. And, unlike in science, how could we or they ever known if they are right?

So, am I a philistine or just someone beginning to appreciate that the force of the artistic process tears away the fragile, pulsating yet stationary palimpsest, that keeps our souls isolated, to finally reveal a royal figure without clothes?

! Lewis Wolpert of University College London, is chairman of Copus (the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science).