Thomas Sutcliffe: The greatest freak show belongs to art

I didn't expect to find myself thinking of contemporary art quite as much as I did when I visited Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum, a new London visitor attraction. After all, this is not a collection devoted to cutting-edge aesthetic practice but a celebration – and exploitation – of the durable human fascination with the outlandish. It's a place where you're supposed to go "urgh" and "oooh".

And yet, as I walked round, past the whale's foreskin and the Chinese branding irons, I found myself thinking of stalwarts of British and international art. Of Damien Hirst, principally. They're very keen on mutants at Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, and open the exhibition with an assembly of stuffed animals that have more than the traditional complement of legs and heads – several of which call to mind Hirst's posed or bisected livestock.

If that doesn't do the trick, what about the-coffee table featuring iridescent tropical butterflies – another medium that has featured prominently in Hirst's oeuvre? And didn't Hirst cover a Mini with his trademark coloured dots?

It isn't just him, either. You come across an image of Jimi Hendrix, carefully painted on to a varnished cow pat – and, if you've been paying any attention to the London art-scene in the past 10 years, you'll get a little blast of Chris Ofili, not only because he used elephant dung in some of his works, but because his fascination with black religious icons is shared by the Mexican artist who produced Ripley's masterpiece.

I even heard a faint bell ringing when I was standing in front of one of Ripley's proudest possessions – a formal portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales made entirely from dryer lint. I remembered the Baltic Gallery's British Art Show of 2005 which included an installation by the Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad, who teases out fluff from newly laid carpet to create little sculptures of rabbits and other creatures.

I'm pretty sure that there are other fine art connections to be made here, too – whether it's with the Post-it note portrait of Stevie Wonder, which shimmers in and out of visibility because of its pixellated grain, or the David Mach-like creations made from masses of similar objects. And this isn't evidence that Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum is more high-minded than you might have expected. It's actually just a reminder that a streak of carnival sensation is threaded through quite a lot of contemporary art – and that our responses to it are rarely as abstract and intellectual as we might think. Incidentally, Tate Modern is free and Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum costs a small fortune. The fine-art freak show is much better value.

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