Stephen Bayley: Ivan Massow may be a lippy self-publicist, but he is right about Brit Art

The trouble with conceptual art is the poverty of most of the concepts. The trouble with Tracey's bed – resisting any snide comments about personal hygiene – is not that it is shocking, rather that it is not shocking enough. Great art should astonish – who's astonished by Tracey's bed? They must have led a very sheltered life.

Ivan Massow, the sacked chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, may be a lippy self-publicist, but he is right – or, at least, in possession of more half-truths than most – when he claims that a lot of Brit Art is sub-standard. His epic spat with the ICA, as quaint and time-expired an institution as you could hope to find, is a classic of British public life. The outspoken outsider threatens the stability of a cosy establishment. The oddity is that the outsider is not a demented radical, fomenting social insurrection, but a pushy rich kid.

The cosy establishment is not the Carlton Club, but a gallery, yearning to be confrontational but pitifully set in its ways. Not much of note has happened at the ICA since 1956 when it hosted an exhibition with the acronym TIT, for This Is Tomorrow. That led to what we now call Pop Art, and that gave us Andy Warhol. Record crowds are predicted for Tate Modern's Warhol show. This suggests to me that the public has a keen appetite for beautiful images ... the traditional province of art which the conceptualists neglect. Warhol was bright, funky and modern, but he was also a highly intelligent craftsman who dealt in often delightful imagery.

Conceptual art was the invention of Marcel Duchamp. A supremely creative individual, even if the charlatan in him occasionally got the better of the genius. His paradox was that his creativity destroyed conventional art. In the early 20th century the products of industry – aeroplanes and roller bearings, Bugatti engines et al had usurped gallery art as delegates of beauty. Duchamp's commentary was to propose the "ready-made". He selected banal items – a urinal, a rack for drying wine bottles – and said they were art because he said so. That done, he had nothing more to say and the sense not to say it. He spent the last decades of his life playing chess.

Asked by an American journalist why he had not made more out of his invention, he said "My capital is time, not money". Unfortunately, Duchamp's heirs do not have his style, wit or tact. The electric lights going out is a perfect metaphor for the dark, blind alley Duchamp signposted. Conceptual art is all the things Massow said, and you can add boring. Georgia O'Keeffe believed there is only one test for art: "Is it interesting?" There is another test. Is it beautiful? Now, here is a daring concept. If the ICA wanted to be deeply shocking and subversive it would fearlessly advocate beauty. Despite what they say, there's no difficulty in defining art. Beauty needs to be rehabilitated.

Tracey, Damien and that lot may be geniuses at outrage, creators of masterpiece pranks. For their quixotic inventiveness and personal style I greatly admire them. They are originals. But their public achievements are more to do with the history of publicity than the history of art. Art has to be visual and beauty has to be its business : the terrible beauty of Goya as much as the divine equanimity of Piero or the brooding melancholy of Rothko. And while beauty has a conceptual dimension, it is predominantly about physical properties. These physical properties require technical skills. This leads some contemporary practitioners into difficulties. As Robert Hughes said about "sculptor" Jeff Koons, he lacks the technique to carve his name on a tree.

Duchamp sensed that beauty could be mass-produced. Since then, "art" has been in crisis. When the consumer's appetite for beauty can be satisfied by the cinema, photography and cars, it is easier to retreat into dreary concepts than to compete. The challenge for Tracey and Damien would be either to invent a new term for what they do – it's fascinating, but it's not art – or let them get really edgy, risky and competitive in the pursuit of beauty. Are they up to it? I don't know because they've never tried.

Rowan Pelling is away