Two idiotic notions emerged from the recent fire in an east London storage warehouse which frazzled hundreds of works of art. The works lost included over 50 paintings by the late Patrick Heron, a decade's worth of work by the painter Gillian Ayres, and some of the most notorious works owned by Charles Saatchi, including the Chapman brothers' Hell and the tent by Tracey Emin entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With.
The first idiocy was the idea that Charles Saatchi and some of the artists whose work was lost were getting their come-uppance after years of hype and charlatanism. Bad art comes to a bad end - it was the line run in several newspapers and the reaction of many who have no time for Saatchi's taste.
The second idiocy was the idea that the fire marked the end of something - an era, or a phenomenon; call it Britart, the Saatchi years or the decade of Damien, Tracey and the Chapmans.
Let's take each of these responses, before ending with another, more sensitive question: was it OK to laugh?
Charles Saatchi, along with Hirst, Emin and the Chapmans, were getting their come-uppance only if you are a malicious ferret. The source of such schadenfreude can only be envy of the kind that resents people becoming famous and earning money for activities that are not conventionally productive. It emerges from a shrivelled, proudly ill-informed vision of art. I say all this as someone who gets a kick out of only the very best of Damien Hirst's work, has little time for Tracey Emin and who finds the Chapman brothers philosophically revolting. So it is not that I personally mourn the loss of Emin's tent, or Hirst's cynical spot paintings. (On the other hand, I do regret the loss of the Chapman brothers' Hell, a set of nine model tableaux of Nazi concentration camps, perhaps because a philosophically revolting stance can occasionally produce something extreme enough to be interesting.)
Many arguments can be mounted against Britart generally and Saatchi in particular - I have mounted some of them in this column - but when you weigh these against the energy and excitement these artists and Saatchi have brought to cultural life not only in London but around the world, they do not amount to a case for come-uppance, least of all arson.
The second absurdity - the idea that the Momart fire marks the end of an era - is the sort of columnist's speculation that takes off like wildfire because it answers to a yearning for shallow formulations of cultural meaning. Really, I ask you. The facts are these: both the Saatchi Gallery at County Hall and Tate Modern are attracting huge numbers of visitors. Shows of work by artists such as Hirst, Emin and the Chapman brothers are receiving just as much media attention - and possibly even more critical praise - as they did ten years ago. Indeed, what took off as a combination of marketing savvy, good luck and youthful conviction is - as with all new movements in art - looking more and more like a complicated creative phenomenon, comprised of mostly sincere and sometimes talented artists, that was initially both overpraised and over-abused but which is now settling down into a period of more discerning reception. In a sense, the full range of works destroyed in the fire is representative of the current state of British art: painters (eg Gillian Ayres and Chris Ofili) are thriving alongside the Duchampian conceptualists favoured by Saatchi, and everyone is still quietly looking to older artists (eg Heron) for inspiration.
All of which leads us to the final question raised by this otherwise arbitrary fire: are we allowed to laugh?
I don't see why not. The idea that we must necessarily be heartbroken about the destruction of art is based on false, unsustainable ideology. Why should we be, if we don't like the art? More importantly, isn't there a certain black humour - the most British, most life-affirming brand of humour - buried beneath the surface of this affair?
If there were such a thing as a British humour tribunal which decided what one could and could not find funny, it would be betraying one of the finest traditions of this nation if it did not give this one the nod. A phenomenon like contemporary art, so inevitably dependent on the flukey thermals of markets and media exposure, meeting so flukey and unfortunate an end - isn't there a marvellous irony in all that that might give rise to a giggle?
Indeed, there is always humour in the conceptual mismatch of art and money. But there is a more particular humour just waiting to combust in the mismatch of the popular idea of art as a passport to immortality and contemporary art's courting of banality and impermanence. Think of the Chapman brothers' defacing of a set of Disasters of War etchings by Goya. Think of their rhetoric of contempt for received ideas such as genius, humanism and romantic individualism. More than Hirst and certainly more than Emin, the Chapman brothers were forced by their own worldview into responding to the fire with wisecracks. They performed appropriately. But who knows how they are really feeling about the loss of a work that took them two and a half years to make?
