It's the kind of thing you'd want to watch at Christmas when they show

"It's the kind of thing you'd want to watch at Christmas when they show it on television isn't it? Did I cry? No I didn't. It wasn't that good."Ben, nine, came with his parents and sister. "It was a good film," he agreed, "but it was sad when she died. But did the film have anything to say to the men at the Odeon Leicester Square in London this weekend? And would anybody even own up to a sniffle? "Very uplifting", said Simon, who was with his wife. As to you Damien, Rachel and whoever else is "in" at the moment - go for it Pickle your sheep right and you will get rich quick.

And the rest of us will catch up with your work when it gets into the public galleries.. You'll know by now that the new cinema adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women has struck a winning formula, satisfying both politically alert critics and those who think they don't make them like this anymore, netting £37,326 in its first three days on a single screen. Bringing art to everyone is, properly, the work of public institutions, pressure groups, politicians, museum directors, Artangel and even the media. But as long as art can appeal to our vanity, our social ambitions, our idea of what constitutes sophisticated taste, the Arty-Smarty gallery will be there to cleverly exploit our desire to buy and to be the right thing. By its very nature the central London gallery must be exclusive.None of this rant is to advocate selling art on the cheap. The fashion for flogging paintings supermarket-style in big, slick shows is simply the same principle at work on a bigger scale, an attempt to make people feel that a bargain-basement painting on the wall is somehow preferable to no painting at all. Galleries are not "special project rooms" but Sloaney shops run by bushy-tailed young things who would sell their grandmother (Whistler's mother, even better) if they could get her to pose as a living sculpture like clever Gilbert & George.

Fashions for new forms and schools of art come and go, but though the smart art word changes its clothes, it never changes its spots.Art is, if one strips away the social cachet and academic pretension of galleries, above all, a commodity. "Suddenly", as style sections of newspapers say, art is "in". Ah, but cast aside that sea of designer-silk, those baseball caps, battered motorbike jackets and right-on mumbling and you will find the children of the grown-ups down the street. The hoi polloi might well enjoy the sight of farm animals pickled for our amusement by beady young artists; so, to keep them at bay, and off our invitation lists, we lean on Ludwig.Surely, though, one can walk down Cork Street on a summer evening and see a gaggle of apparently dclass young things chattering eagerly about the latest trends in art, while the old litist art types drone on about little Johnny's schooldays down the road in fustier galleries? Things are changing. It is designed to flatter the sensibilities of buyers who probably went to university but never quite got a grip on modern philosophy or art theory.

Wittgenstein is relevant to the White Cube gallery only in so far as he might sell a hippopotamus in preserving fluid.This chic, pseudo-academic hype is also guaranteed to keep art out on a social limb. But, why? Well because mainstream contemporary galleries are, as everyone knows, warehouses in the East End of London; central London is a showcase for exceptional "projects". Add to this artful nonsense catalogue essays that Ludwig Wittgenstein himself would be hard-pressed to decode and the hype is in full swing. An artist has to be hyped high and long for prices to rise as high as galleries need to underwrite their costly lifestyle.If selling to sophisticated buyers, the hype must appear erudite. So Jay Jopling, the young man who makes a mint selling the work of artists like Hirst and Whiteread, says that the architecture of his gallery, White Cube, the hang-out for smart young arties, is deeply influenced by Wittgenstein (perennially hip because as wilfully obscure as any artist). Deep, eh? In fact, says Jopling, White Cube is not really an art gallery at all, but a "special project room for contemporary art" Gosh.

But, until the dream comes true, galleries mean money.Their role is to sell art at the highest possible price to people who can be persuaded to part with the readies This is not as easy as it seems. Most dream of escaping the gallery system altogether and of selling direct to clients. Their eyes might brim with untried and untested shapes and colours, but they need to make a living. The painter, unless as cocky as Damien Hirst (White Cube) or as socially adept as, say, Patrick Heron (Waddington's), is rather left out. What the true artist wants to talk about is neither the meaning of his work (there is often none, even when the artist's work is superb), nor little Johnny's brilliant academic career; the artist, quite rightly, wants to talk money.Artists, unless socially ambitious, tend to have their feet on the ground. They have their lists of potential clients and pet critics and know them all by sight.