Thomas Sutcliffe: Bombs and bare-faced cheek

I confess that I honked like a goose when I read that Michael Stone, the loyalist who attacked Stormont in 2006, had pleaded not guilty on the grounds that it was a piece of performance art. This wasn't an entirely seemly response to an assault that that might have – had Stone's stated intentions been achieved – resulted in several deaths, including those of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. But I couldn't help it. It was the barefaced audacity of the tactic that got to me, and its inadvertently pointed commentary on the public standing of contemporary art.

The point about his defence is that it just teeters on the edge of credibility. You blink as you take it in, and for just an instant you think: "Well, you know... stranger things have been done in the name of art." By this light, Stone's attempt to get into the council chamber and sprinkle pipe-bombs around like confetti – while pondering how to use the garrotte, knives and axe he'd carried with him – wasn't a horrible reflux of sectarian blood-lust. It was an interventionist interrogation of our notions of security, carried out in mixed media.

That people do believe artists will do almost anything in pursuit of the muse is undeniable. This year alone, for example, has seen two widely disseminated stories of artistic sociopathy. In the first, it was reported that an artist called Guillermo Vargas had tied up a stray dog in the Codice Gallery in Managua under a sign reading "You Are What You Read" spelled out in dog biscuits. The point of the piece, reportedly, was that the dog was to be allowed to starve to death, in order to bring home to gallery-goers the cruel overlap of prosperity and poverty in modern Latin America. Understandably outraged by this exercise of creative liberty, around a million people signed an online petition against the use of doggy hunger as an artistic medium.

The only problem with the story was that it wasn't true. Vargas had apparently fed the dog well and it was only tied up temporarily. The pooch fled shortly afterwards, preferring a life in the ditches of Managua to a career in the art world.

Or take the story of the Yale University art student, Aliza Shvarts, who announced that her next project would document her own abortions. She had, she said, artificially inseminated herself and then taken abortifacient drugs to procure miscarriages, video footage of which would be projected onto a cuboid screen. The intention, she said, was to spark conversation and debate about the relationship between art and the human body.

This story also caused a flash-fire on the internet, leaping from blog to blog, but it, too, was wide of the mark. Shvarts hadn't done any such thing and the hoax itself was the performance art. In both cases, though, the vast majority of people who heard the descriptions of these pieces thought to themselves: "That's just the sort of thing a contemporary artist would do." This wasn't particularly foolish of them, because both Vargas and Shvarts would have been able to point at real influences had they really done what everybody said they did.

You could, I suppose, take these confusions either as a tragedy for contemporary art or a strange kind of triumph. The conservatively minded art-consumer, with a prejudice for paint stuck to canvas, would argue that they expose the bankruptcy of contemporary artistic practice, in which virtually any action, however ignoble or empty-headed or narcissistic, can be retrospectively gilded as "art". But a less traditionally minded gallery-goer might see it as evidence of a battle half won. There's no question that the old barriers between what legitimately counts as art and what doesn't have been torn down – and that it would be a near impossible job to re-erect them along the old fence-line. The outrages also testify to a widespread sense that art is a special thing and that its privileges should not be frivolously abused. But there still remains one task of persuasion, which is to make it clear that the argument about whether a thing is art or not has now been superseded by a far more interesting crux. Something may well be art on the lowest-common-denominator basis that you, the self-styled "artist", says it is.

Who cares either way, frankly? The point is whether it's good art or not. Stone's performance piece (as far as I know he hasn't revealed its title yet) looked to me to be derivative, crude and dismally monotonous in its underpinning ideas. One hopes that the jury and the judge will find themselves inspired to a bit of performance art themselves – one that involves the use of a convenient prison and lasts a very long time indeed.