No smoking in the art room

I never took up smoking when I was young - mostly because I lacked the will power. But, although I don't really regret my failure to start smoking, I've quite often regretted never having given it up. As someone whose sole victory in the field of abstention has been relinquishing sugar in tea, I look at former smokers in the same way that mere ramblers must once have regarded Edward Whymper.

I never took up smoking when I was young - mostly because I lacked the will power. But, although I don't really regret my failure to start smoking, I've quite often regretted never having given it up. As someone whose sole victory in the field of abstention has been relinquishing sugar in tea, I look at former smokers in the same way that mere ramblers must once have regarded Edward Whymper.

I have wandered in the foothills of self-denial and usually gone home for tea as soon as I got breathless. They have gone high above the snow line, into regions which require special equipment and nerves of steel. They have conquered sharp peaks of longing and inched their way across ice-slopes of temptation, on which one slip would lead to perdition.

Like most armchair adventurers, of course, I find it easy to fantasise that, had the circumstances been different, I too could have been a just such a hero of self-denial. Yes, it would have been hard, but I would have been harder still.

I felt these pangs stir in me again while walking round ArtWORKS, a temporary exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. ArtWORKS is a project that has enlisted artists in the task of raising awareness of the health risks of smoking and the exhibits - notionally at least - all have an admonitory force.

"ArtWORKS uses art as a vehicle to communicate a positive message on smoking cessation" is how the brochure puts it. And naturally enough, non-smokers, to whom these art works might be thought indifferent, will find themselves wondering how the pieces might have stood up to a tidal rip of nicotine dependency pulsing through the blood.

The evidence on the ground isn't particularly promising. The gallery itself is non-smoking, naturally, but when I climbed the stairs to the upper levels, I found a semi-circular recess on the top landing, just out of sight of the gallery attendant. On the floor was a cigarette stub, the guilty residue of some art lover who had been unable to give up even for the duration of his or her visit, let alone the lifetime renunciation that the World Health Organisation was presumably hoping for when it organised the scheme.

But if the ArtWORKS exhibition is going to have any effect at all, I would have thought that it would be to stub out, for once and for all, the illusion that good art can have any simple coercive purpose. Some of the artists look to me to be mischievously aware of this. One of the most direct of the exhibits is a piece by the Russian conceptual artists Komar and Melamid, which consists of a reproduction of a Van Gogh portrait with a stern slogan painted across the top. "Look at Van Gogh and Do Not Smoke", it reads. At the bottom there's a sub-heading alerting you to "The healing power of art". It all seems pretty resolute at first glance, until you notice the characteristic swirls of paint behind Van Gogh's head, which look oddly like a wall of curling cigarette smoke. Has he got a Marlboro Light slyly concealed behind his back? And then it dawns on you that this is one of the portraits that Van Gogh painted after slicing off part of his ear - and the healing power of art begins to look a good deal more uncertain.

Other artists too spend as much time subverting the idea of the health education as they do trying to put smokers off. Sarah Staton's "Smokey Chokey" is surely intended to evoke the guileless aesthetics of the primary school; with its Mr Blobby lettering and naively rendered fag-end, it says far more about the limits of exhortation than it does about the hazards of the evil weed. Similarly Thomas Ruff's "My Dad Quit Smoking" - a hand-tinted photograph of a young boy in a flower garden - undermines its promise of infant gratitude by rouging up the child's cheeks and putting him in lederhosen. Even worrying about such matters begins to look a little antique, less a matter of thinking about one's future than staying in thrall to the past.

Others are more successfully repulsive - repulsion being a virtue in these circumstances - but only, I couldn't help feeling, to those who are non-smokers already. Gavin Turk's "Monkey Business" - a large cibachrome of a clockwork monkey which smokes a real cigarette, puffing out fumes through its rubber lips - is an unflattering image of the smoker as half-automaton, with nicotine hunger as a steadily unwinding mainspring. But perhaps it just reminds the dedicated smoker how long it is since they've last had a fag. In any case there's something decidedly beatific about the expression on the monkey's face.

Lisa Milroy's "Still Life", a glossily modelled ashtray, overflowing with stubs and tobacco shreds and burnt matches, takes us to the heart of the problem more directly. For non-smokers, at least, it's a good image of the polluting effects of smoking - its effortless ability to take pristine things and spoil them. But it can't entirely suppress its artistic delight in the nature of things - and the ability of Pop Art, in particular, to make negligible things precious. And those kind of mixed feelings are hardly surprising, because the art of this century has always valued ambivalence over literal-mindedness. The project, in so many cases, is to make us think twice about things - not to extinguish our uncertainties in favour of some approved line. You sense that several of the artists in this show would really like to have given up the ingrained addiction to ambiguity. But, to their credit, the best of them found themselves helplessly slipping back to their old habits. Anyone who wants to give up smoking, in short, would be better off using nicotine patches, not cultural elastoplast - because the latter just won't stick.

I spent some time the other day trying to answer a question I'd often asked myself - why it is that bus shelters are made of such seductively frangible material. It was prompted by a pretty common sight in any large city - a pale green granita of glass lying on the pavement and a workman busy installing a fresh pane - ready for the next oaf who wants to do his bit for damage. I suppose some form of crude connoisseurship must operate even for hooligans, and it would seem that bus shelter windows are premier cru stuff for those who love the sound of breaking glass. But why is it that the people who make bus shelters so untiringly supply them with the raw material for their passion?

Pierre Jeanjean, who is the managing director of JC Decaux, a company that is one of the country's biggest suppliers of street furniture, obligingly explained that aesthetics was the principle reason. They like their bus shelters to look good, and boot and brick resistant materials don't age very well. Perspex and polycarbonate go milky, he explained, and the whole affair begins to look tacky. Karen Thompson, the development director of Adshel, one of JC Decaux's competitors, explained that their patience wasn't unlimited either. Under the terms of the contracts that they have with local authorities, they cover the costs of maintenance - so if the windows are getting shattered too often, they will move, albeit reluctantly, to instal polycarbonate replacements.

If that doesn't work, they undertake what she called "more extensive fortressing" - in other words fitting fibreglass panels that are opaque, virtually unbreakable and a pretty reliable indicator that your neighbourhood will soon be featuring in the "Run and Don't Look Back" section of the property pages. Ms Thompson couldn't throw any light on the dubious attractions of bus shelter assault - she understandably feels rather aggrieved about such activities - but I think Monsieur Jeanjean inadvertently gave a clue when making a point about the way that plastics slowly lose their looks: "With glass, either it looks good or it's broken, " he said, "You don't get the in-between bit really". And that, surely, is the key - the kind of safety glass they use in bus shelters abbreviates the "in-between bit" to the point where it is almost magical. One moment it's there in all its glassy integrity, the next it has sifted to the ground in a drift of diamonds. For instant gratification and economy of effort a piece of splintering Perspex obviously just can't touch it.

Those who regret the general decay of standards in Parliament can take some comfort from A.C. Grayling's new biography of the critic and essayist. In it he describes Hazlitt's brief stint as a Parliamentary reporter. Like most novices in that place, Hazlitt was astounded most of all by its surreal commitment to repetition. "Not only are the topics the same," he writes, "the very phrases are served up as the Order of the Day; the same parliamentary bead-roll of grave impertinence is twanged off, in full cadence, by the Honourable Member or his Learned and Honourable Friend; and the well-known, voluminous, calculable periods roll over the drowsy ears of the auditors, almost before they are delivered from the vapid tongue that utters them!" And on their powers of thought.

"Talk of mobs!" he exclaimed. "Is there any body of people that has this character in a more consummate degree than the House of Commons? Is there any set of men that determines more by acclamation, and less by deliberation and internal conviction?" It's good to know that the old ways are being maintained with such fidelity.