Earlier this year the artist Sebastian Horseley travelled to the Philippines with a video camera and a bunch of nails, intrigued by the rituals of a local Christian sect, who each year re-enact the Crucifixion. A short while later he returned to London, minus the nails, which he had managed to convince some daft sod to hammer into his body, and offered the hitherto unknown observation that crucifixion is extremely painful. He plans to exhibit this mutilation on film next year. Fair enough, but I've known joiners make a much worse job of their mitts than him. But it begs the question of artistic licence. What about the thorns and the walloping, great spear that was plunged into Christ, the original copyright holder?

I bring this up after a friend was lambasted as ''ignorant'', ''stupid'' and ''thick'' by a so-called high priest of culture, after he disrespectfully doffed his cloth cap at the formaldehyde world of flogging dead sharks that is contemporary art. Shock, it seems, is in. But you dare not criticise, lest you be branded an ignorant mule for not understanding the etiquette of weirdness. If we believe the high priests, the work of the deified enfants terrible engender so much distaste simply because the punter lacks insight and doesn't really identify with real art. The lumpen mass, at a push, recognise decent architecture, a bit of music and the odd painting, but lack depth, profundity and imagination. In a Dantesque kind of way, the punters are seen as the mob. The truth of the matter is that the only people who are shocked by art are the art establishment themselves. The rest of us, the mob,

are usually just bored, our shells already too thick to damage.

I mean, if the Filipinos have been hammering their flesh for a small lifetime, then what exactly are Horseley's motives? Then there's Tracy Emin, with her condom littered,

I-forgot-to-make-my-bed art and, more recently, her dilapidated beach hut, supposedly some kind of metaphor for crappy boyfriends, miscarriages, and sundry other personal demons. Meanwhile, Hell, the ''new'' work of brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, hyped as the centrepiece of Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, currently running at the Royal Academy, London, displays Nazis leading Jews into gas ovens; a representation of the Holocaust with mutilated genitals.

And what about the doyen of Young British Artists, Damien Hirst? Recently he was quoted as saying: ''I'm worried about my work. I'm flogging a dead horse.'' What next for Damien, the panicked art world laments, from behind a sheet of perspex. A bloke in a ten-gallon hat, I'd wager, flogging drums of petrol and hollering, ''Feel my pain.'' Step forward on to the podium, waxwork Popes being attacked by meteors; dead girls with phallus noses; a wardrobe and someone's underpants. So what? Shock is only special when it actually works, when it's clever, able to stimulate and not be inert, nor awful. In the case of many of today's contemporary artists the shock value is as challenging as a game of five-a-side football on a wet Sunday. The same blood, guts, condoms in bags, vicarious feelings of disgust (over missed penalties), Myra Hindley lookalikes and the occasional personal catharsis.

Much lauded ccontemporary art elicits little more than the yawn factor. What about irony? God forbid, a little touch of realism and technique. This is missing because too many artists are caught up in their own cerebral world, masquerading as narrative, where the idea of art is crafted so much that it has become arid and is no longer able to communicate. Feeling has gone from art because feeling is viewed as passe. I could stick my neck out and say that spirituality is also redundant. If shock can shift the

meaning of the viewer and destroy preconceptions, then fair enough. But when it exists merely for shock's sake it is a poor imitation of art. Contemporary is now the anti-climax.

In the case of Emin, she has moved with amphibian ability from being the corrupted (teenage rape, abortions, miscarriage) to being the corruptor. The abused becoming the abuser. Her dark beauty and private imbroglios she has marketed profoundly, like a dusky, and ultimately tragic, Paula Yates. She is more Saatchi than Saatchi. And if you don't get it there must be something wrong with you. You are not culturally aware. Most of it also claims to be working class, meanwhile most working class people don't have the time to wade around in brooding, so-called revolutionary art. They've got jobs to do and, heaven help us, make artistic judgments of their own. Witness the millions who

watched Big

Brother. Ironically, they're already half way towards Emin's navel gazing.

Artists are far more on the ball these days in terms of making money, and I would be loath to criticise them for this. But you can question the art. It is very difficult to judge art but one sure way is if it speaks 20 or 30 years down the line. Although there are many artists trying to pioneer new work, there is nothing really new at the moment. In a way artists have become sociologists, commenting but adding little to the mix. Most of it is dodgy, one-liner, supine art.

Contemporary art should not need to appeal to everybody, but much of it, cloaked in the make-believe garments of artifice, fails because it is flat. You cannot, of course, homogenise culture and art, but if the high-priests of culture invite people to dine, they should at least have the courtesy to let their guests choose what they eat. If people want martyrs, and to see other people suffering, all they need to do is look at real contemporary art - newspapers. Schadenfreude, after all, is not the exclusive preserve of museums. Which leads me back to Horseley. Now, if he died, raised himself back to life . . .