British art is in rude health, Mr Culture Minister

Those who criticise the Tate for the Turner prize forget that Turner was dismissed as a doodler

No one can accuse the English of not taking their artists seriously. We have Kim Howells, a Culture minister no less, accusing the Turner prize candidates of producing "cold, mechanical conceptual bullshit". And we have Walter Sickert, the British impressionist, accused of being Jack the Ripper. That would have been conceptual art of a quite different order.

It's most unlikely, of course. Although the crime writer Patricia Cornwell has spent millions on testing DNA samples, the most she has established is that he may have written one of the letters to the police about the subject. Otherwise her suspicions are based on no more than the fact that the artist took a close interest in the case and even visited the scene of one of the Ripper's crimes.

He wasn't alone. The Ripper case dominated his times even more than that of the sniper in Washington today. And if an artist who is keen on painting low life in reaction to academic art gets obsessed with the cause célèbre of the day, that's what artists tend to do – and should do.

Which is all the so-called conceptual artists are doing today, when it comes to it. Paint was the preferred medium of Sickert's time, not least because technical changes in the medium were revolutionising its possibilities. The relatively small painting that could be hung on a wall was the preferred form because that was where the market was. Art had moved from the decoration of public institutions to the adornment of the bourgeois home.

The video camera, plastic, formaldehyde and industrial materials are the preferred medium of today because they are the texture of our life. The installation is the preferred form because the main market is in galleries – the Saatchis and the White Cube that have long dominated the Turner Prize. Art has become self-referential because society has become self-obsessed. Its structures have become more complex because it expects to be shown in the large open spaces of museums and galleries.

Mr Howells is right on that. Where the money is, so the tide of art follows. But for him to argue that art has lost "any kind of purchase on public consciousness" is just nonsense. Look at the numbers going to Tate Modern (which has a pretty poor stock of international modern art). And look at the interest that has been generated by the Turner prize. The one thing that everyone comprehends is an unmade bed, a film of a building site or rude words written over and over again. They have no problem in understanding it. They're just not convinced that it's "art".

Which is where the whole debate gets so bogged down in this country. Mr Howells has every right to his own opinion. The fact that he is a Culture minister (for films, tourism and broadcasting in fact) should be no bar to saying what he dislikes. Nor can he be easily dismissed as a philistine. He's a former art student himself. Who else could write such a sentence as: "The attempts of contextualisation are particularly pathetic and symptomatic of a lack of conviction." And who else, after that mouthful, could accuse this newspaper of launching a "smug, sneering attack" on him for his comments. If nothing else, he has drummed up a bit of passion.

If you are going to go to an exhibition of conceptual art, why not make it interactive by pinning abusive notes on the wall. "If this is the best the British art establishment can come up, then God help us." It's that word "establishment" that gives him away. Shove that into your comments and you're straight into the world of sneers against the aesthetes, the arties, the privileged and the élites – all the people the English love to hate.

And you can rely on the museum world to give you all the ammunition you want. Asked to respond on the radio yesterday, the Tate apologist compared art today to "a football game, you need to know the rules before you can approach it". Rules, for art! What is he talking about? No wonder public art is regarded as a private preserve. The very term "conceptual" is enough to put anyone off.

But it is the "what is art?" debate that has become so tedious in this country and that Mr Howells is quite knowingly playing on. It's been around ever since the Academy forced the first Impressionists into holding their own exhibition by refusing them picture space. Those who criticise the Tate for calling its annual event the Turner prize forget that Turner himself, and especially his late, almost abstract, work, was dismissed as doodles and mere daubs.

We've been through all the argument about Marcel Duchamp's urinal in 1917. The work of the Dadaists was called just that because they believed the repetition of nonsense was the only means of expressing the world after the First World War. Is Mr Howells trying to make us all die of boredom with his own form of Dadaist repetition?

No, as a politician, he knows perfectly well what he is doing, which is to indulge in that old English entertainment of abusing the modern, with the little flick of suggested class conflict in it all. Soviet artists had all this when Stalin insisted that art and music had to be "popular" and "useful to the masses" and the great composers such as Shostakovich were dismissed for "formalism".

"What it means," said Prokoviev wearily, "is any piece that you need to listen to twice before you can fully appreciate it."

God forbid that anyone here should have to spend any time to understand a work of art, or concentrate on it. That England is always regarded as fundamentally philistinic abroad is not because it does not appreciate art. In the plastic arts especially it has always held a high position in the world. It's because, alone of the European countries, it is thought clever and entertaining to denigrate the arts here.

There's nothing working class about this. Turner, Epstein and Moore all came from very ordinary backgrounds, and the working classes have traditionally held art in high esteem. It's the attitude of the bluff country squire – "I may not know about much but I know what I don't like" – that would have an artist kept in his role as an artisan and judged by the skill of his craft. Prince Charles is a self-appointed spokesman and now Mr Howells has joined him.

There is method in this deliberate ignorance. To confine art to the realms of the craftsman makes aesthetic judgement that much easier. Is it technically good, or what Howells calls "exuding artistic ability"? More important, the artisan reassures. The artist would claim to challenge, to give a view. And that is not wanted in the world of the Royal Family, or of New Labour.

Henri Matisse famously dreamt of "an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling and depressing sub-matter". He was being disingenuous. Matisse, who burst forth as a member of the Fauves, "the wild beasts", produced an art that constantly subverts forms and conventions, that forces you to see anew the world around, from his Fauvist savagery to his last jazz cut-outs. All art engages, great art changes.

Mr Howells may or may not be right about the current crop of the Turner shortlist. Great art, or even good art, is not produced year on year. But the past 20 years – the two decades Howell dismisses as having produced nothing worthwhile – which have thrown up Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Gilbert and George and the Chapman brothers, are not short of things to say or a willingness to find new means to do so.

But, on second thoughts, perhaps it would be more worrying if a government minister did appreciate them.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk