ONE hundred and fifty years ago this year, Honore de Balzac published a short story called The Unknown Masterpiece. In it, a painter called Frenhofer has been closeted away for years, working on what he believes will be his greatest masterpiece. When two of his admirers finally get him to finish the painting and show it to them, they are stunned; shocked speechless not by the work's unparalleled beauty, but rather by what they see as its deranged incompetence.

To them, Frenhofer's canvas is a confusion of lines and incomprehensible paint marks. Certain elements tip them off to the fact this is a painting as they understand the word, but overall they are convinced the great master has lost his mind, that this new painting is the work of a misfiring genius. Everything that has equipped them to enjoy and appreciate painting tells them this mess is demented rubbish.

Balzac's is an attractive fable, and one which seems to have gathered increasingly rich resonance over the years. In the last century and a half, many have found themselves, metaphorically, standing in Frenhofer's atelier, wondering exactly when the old guy went nuts.

The limitations of Frenhofer's two fans, however, are not the same limitations under which we operate today. As men of their time, they seem incapable of admitting the fallibility of their judgments, of seeing other possible interpretations, of working under more fluid standards of assessment, of finding value in any other way but in the way they always have. They are clearly working with a type of confidence in what is good, bad, mad or sane which is simply no longer available.

Since the 1960s, there has been an awareness among artists that art does not exist in a vacuum, and that works of art, as Hans Haacke puts it, "have been singled out as culturally significant objects by those who at any given time wield the power to confer the predicate `work of art' unto them". As a result of gradually adopting this position, that which in previous epochs had been referred to as "life" became the subject of art in a new and profoundly challenging manner.

One part of the fallout of this particular way of seeing, however, has been that the discussion of the operation of everything that helps to confer the status of art object - galleries, museums, criticism, politics, materials, the media - has become a central subject of art. At the same time, discussion of art began on its trajectory towards claiming equal status with the art objects it discusses, something that continues to infuriate many who prefer to imagine that they encounter art without mediation.

This newfound lack of confidence in absolute art offers, in principle, enormous freedom, a liberty from the tyranny of good taste, from norms that must be adhered to, and most of all from the social obligation to believe in the artist as alchemist. But such tremendous changes are not without repercussions. The problems that arise from this fiddling with traditional demarcation in the art world are exactly the sort of problems that arise in any trade when familiar working practices, wages and general support structures are under threat.

Our current anxieties about art arise because we still have not really figured out what the word means in our age. We are not sure exactly what art is supposed to do, and consequently remain equally uncertain what form it should take. Art no longer seems to fit into its old place, but we can't work out its new one. At the same time, although we don't know what it is, we can't seem to stop doing it. It is this unignorable paradox, rather than reactionary stubbornness, conceptual dematerialisation, greedy appropriation, smirking postmodernism, falling standards, or any number of other often diagnosed diseases, which is at the heart of the crisis in art.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current struggle is that new movements, fads or fashions in art no longer seem to have the authority or the power to eclipse old ones. The contemporary art scene is like one eternal instalment of Back To The Future, in which the audience is obliged to leap between the Wild West, small town America in the 1950s, some 22nd century dystopia and any number of stops in between.

Pop Art has perhaps never been so important, monochrome painting carries on regardless, works of immersive virtual reality jostle for attention with postcard watercolours, guerilla art is programmed alongside High Modernist revivalism. Meanwhile, art critics seem just as happy writing about the Gulf War, Extra Large Tshirts, pro wrestling and shopping malls, as about whatever is happening in the galleries and museums.

A CURRENT poster advertisement for a brand of cider, featuring a hyper enlarged, full colour photograph of a single apple blossom, is one of the most densely communicative images to be produced in Ireland in many years. Although clearly designed to promote a certain image of the apple based drink, it also seems to say something about the way many city dwellers experience nature.

The advertisement's copy line about the blossoms trumpeting the arrival of spring makes a boldly ironic statement since, in reality, it is not blossoms that announce the change of season, but giant photographic images of blossoms created to encourage consumption. The idea is made all the more poignant since the notion of seasonal fruit is rapidly becoming a quaint idea, associated with some desirable, nostalgic, authentic period in the past. And if you're not interested in any of that interpretation, and you think it's all steamed up nonsense, well, you've still got some nice big pictures of pretty flowers all over the city.

It is simply not a tenable position to suggest that, for example, Jeanne Rynhart's statue of Molly Malone is a work of the same order as those cider advertisements, either conceptually or from the old "looking good" point of view.

To assume that making art, particularly art that offers meaning to a wide contemporary audience, is a matter of aping 19th century traditions of realism is a blunder. But it is equally mistaken to make similar claims for most of the "contemporary practice currently on show in Dublin galleries.

To assume that we even know for certain where to look for art, never mind what it is, can only be a mistake. So what is Art in 1997? Well, it's a play by Yasmina Reza, isn't it?