This naughty business of trying to shock

We lack a word. No doubt we lack several. Think of a word to describe George Galloway's sleek self-righteousness, for example, and you will discover it doesn't exist. No word can face in so many directions simultaneously. But it isn't a word for the equivocations of politics I'm missing; it's a word for one of the crowning fatuities of contemporary art.

What's the word for getting people to take their clothes off on the steps of a gallery? "Chutzpah" is a possibility, though that's only good to describe the entrepreneurial side of the business: that with which one gets away. The word I want defines the nature of the intended aesthetic affront, the frisson.

"Transgression" remains in favour among those who curate these things – transgression denoting murderous intent and high philosophic discourse all at once – though it's hard to believe that even curators felt much was being transgressed by all that pink flesh rolling about outside the new Saatchi Gallery the other week. It certainly wasn't any decorum of clothedness: respectability of that sort having gone out with the ark.

Hence the problem finding the right word. What do you call the will to shock in a world where no one is any longer shockable and you don't have any shocking content to impart anyway? Naughtiness? Well that gets the feebleness of the payload right enough, but it implies a certain end-of-the-pier good-naturedness, a consciousness of innocence, which the so-called transgressive arts are at pains to disown. The French adjective "méchant" is better, if only because all French words achieve less than they mean to. This is the reason the language of contemporary art relies so heavily on French thought: the built-in folie de grandeur is irresistible.

But the noun which goes with "méchant" is "méchanceté", which sounds too purposefully steely for my liking. What I'd prefer is the empty flourish of "méchanterie" – the act of being footling naughty, exemplifying or exhorting naughtiness to no effect – but I'm told the word "méchanterie" doesn't exist.

Alternatively, you could forget the word and go see a small exhibition of Ron Mueck's work at the National Gallery. You're already there for Titian, so it's a mere hop and a step to Mueck, and you won't feel let down either. Ron Mueck, in case you have forgotten, is the sculptor whose Dead Dad struck discerning critics as the only truly sensational work in the Royal Academy's famous Sensation exhibition in 1997 – sensation being another of those would-be transgressive words which I would prefer to see substituted by "méchanterie".

Though it must be said that there was nothing footlingly naughty about Dead Dad. The grown man shrunk to the size of a child again, the verisimilitude of hair, of pore, of coloration, the sexual organs still seemingly alive in death, the very mystery of the soul made present in the mystery of uncovered flesh, the invitation to look upon nakedness as we have never seen it before – here, in the invitation and the spectacle, was shockingness indeed. Not because it had the power to upset a major and his lady from Tunbridge Wells, not because it was an affront to anybody's mere respectability, but because it shocked us as beings who share the shame and the invincibility of bearing flesh – bearing it and baring it – and because it reminded us of the powerful reasoning behind all its associated taboos.

The star piece of the current show is Man in a Boat. A diminutive silicone figure, naked, sitting in the prow of a battered wooden rowing boat, absently craning his neck, not searching exactly, and not desperate to see whatever his is looking at or for, his attention no more than half-seized, but peering past us, as though we are an obstacle, a trouble to his view, and in that sense wishing us away. A nice illusion, comparable to the Mona Lisa's stare which, as they used to tell us at school, always met our own no matter where we stood, only in this case, regardless of where we place ourselves, the man avoids us, refusing all collusion.

You can be theological about that if you wish to be. The great thing about realism, or any other sort of particularism in art, is that it alone provokes universal thoughts. The smaller Mueck's attention to detail – and the man peering out to sea, or wherever, is a masterpiece of detailed observation – the more vast the world he explores. This is not chance; it is a rule of art. God will not appear merely because you shout his name aloud. Thus the grandiloquence of Damien Hirst's butcheries with their ironic and then again maybe not ironic windbag titles – The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living etc – leads us seamlessly to the artist's other career as restaurateur; while Man in a Boat – the man all but oblivious to himself, only marginally curious about his journey, his features unheroic, his little acorn penis a forgotten entity between his thighs, neither sensual man nor spiritual – has us musing on infinity.

That Mueck is an artist in the now old-fashioned sense of maker of art – that is to say he sculpts with his own hands – you would know even if the catalogue didn't tell you. Of all the mysteries of art this is the most mysterious: the aura of authentic feeling about a work the artist makes, and the absence of that aura about the work he only commissions or decrees. It was primarily out of contempt for mere craft that modernism jettisoned the once unassailable belief in making; but the resulting paradox is that nothing ends up looking more like a handicrafts bazaar than your average hands-off YBA installation, whereas Ron Mueck the maker, who once made models for television – even fashioned a Muppet or two if I am not mistaken – creates around his work an atmosphere of divinity and abstraction most conceptual artists would kill for.

The lesson for the artist being: he who sets out to be new, won't be. And he who means to shock, doesn't.