Philip Hensher: Shouldn't we ditch this snobbery about popular art?

Like quite a few Lottery funded projects, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead has passed from triumphant opening to anguished head-scratching without much intervening. What, people are starting to ask, is it actually for?

When it opened in 2002, it must have seemed, to optimistic opinion, part of a conceptual renaissance. Antony Gormley's thrilling and justifiably popular Angel of the North encouraged people to think that perhaps there was a general enthusiasm for contemporary art in Gateshead. If a converted power station in London could be a success as a modern art museum, how much more successful would a converted flour mill in Gateshead prove?

In fact, the local enthusiasm for Gormley's sculpture turned out to be exactly that, an enthusiasm for one sculpture. Keith Haring, the Wilson twins, Brian Eno's paintings: with the exception of a much-praised Kienholz show, most of its recent work hasn't impressed with a seriousness of purpose. More to the point, it hasn't pulled in anything like the numbers hoped for, and its director, Peter Doroshenko, seems to be thinking hard about changing its direction.

One forthcoming exhibition, in particular, has raised eyebrows across the board. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, the gallery is this week opening an exhibition of the work of Beryl Cook. It is hard to think of an artist further removed from the quarry of conceptual artists and video art, graffiti and performance art that the Baltic has generally pursued. Cook is widely known for her fat ladies, her garish colours, her anecdotal subjects and what used, politely, to be known as "naïve" style. If you asked 100 random people in the street to name a living painter, she would probably come second only to Rolf Harris.

Voices have been raised. A critic called William Varley said: "Showing Beryl Cook flies in the face of everything. Next thing they will be showing that Scotsman with the Italian name." He meant Jack Vettriano, a touchstone for all that is most detested by the conventional art world.

I wonder, though, why not? It seems to me that there are, now, 1,000 recently built municipal art galleries all around the world, all attempting to do almost exactly what the Baltic is trying to do. They all show very much the same sort of artists. They want an Anselm Kiefer, a Maurizio Cattelan, a Louise Bourgeois and a Bill Viola. They are all getting excited about the Chinese avant-garde. All perfectly good artists. But perhaps the market has reached saturation point, and with a little more enterprise, the Baltic could do something different.

A museum that goes for a different approach can, quite quickly, gather the sort of international reputation and genuine popularity that has clearly eluded the Baltic. In the spring, I was in Switzerland and visited the Museum of Outsider Art in Lausanne. Art created in garden sheds, kept under caretakers' beds, vast stretches of calico drawn in in blue biro by seamstresses, colossal abstractions from the madhouse - it was one of the most absorbing museums I ever saw in my life, and worth a hundred Kiefer-filled halls.

There is, surely, a proper place for popular art. Not Pop Art, not folk art, and not Outsider art, but art intended for and enjoyed by a mass audience. It's curious that, in other art forms, a considerable mutual respect exists between high artists and those with mass appeal. The most literary novelist will admire the craft of a good thriller; Stockhausen appears on the cover of Sgt Pepper, and Kurt Weill had the highest respect for the Broadway musical.

Only in the case of the visual arts are we supposed to recoil in horror from anything with mass appeal and, in general, we are only ever offered the opportunity to see any of it in reproduction. What, really, would be so terrible about a Museum of Popular Art, which did, indeed, show the works of "that Scotsman with the Italian name"? Vettriano might not be the world's most original painter, but his work is honestly and often attractively done. Beryl Cook is not an uglier painter than Botero.

Of course, some of the artists that such a museum would have to consider would be difficult for sophisticated tastes to enjoy. There is an enormously popular and successful American painter called Thomas Kinkade, who paints landscapes glowing like radioactive Edinburgh Rock. Any sane person, you would have thought, would have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a show of work like that.

But clearly not: quite a lot of people like it. And there is a solid body of work at the junction between commercial illustration and proper painting - not just Warhol - which it would be rather interesting to see in the flesh. I would love to see a show of the work of Norman Rockwell, for instance, or the science fiction fantasies of HR Giger, or the charming fashion illustrations of Erté.

No one would seriously want to see the National Gallery or the Tate filled with such stuff, but I don't see that it would do the slightest harm to turn one gallery in the world into a showcase for artists who live mainly by selling their reproduction rights. Some respect, I feel, is due to artists who possess a decent degree of craft and visual appeal.

And it would at last answer a puzzling question: why, when the visual arts are such enormously profitable enterprises, is it seemingly impossible to run any museum devoted to them without large sums of public money?

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