Fashion gallery photo show

On my way to "Rapture/David LaChapelle", the double-headed "fashion-as-art" shows currently on at the Barbican, I was leafing through a pile of newspapers on the Tube and, my goodness, were they full of anxiety. Columnists from Wapping to Canary Wharf were all fretting over the same subject: is Versace worthy? Is Elizabeth Hurley worthy? Worthy, that is, of inspiring museum exhibitions. The week before, the V&A's retrospective of clothes by the late Gianni Versace -- "the man who made THAT dress for Liz!" every article added, as an explanation, or justification -- opened, and the newspapers did not seem impressed: "Versace is somehow too much of a money-making enterprise to justify [this exhibition], and the clothes are not original enough to reward the aesthetic examination," fumed the Independent. Even the fashion editors were a little wary: "A frock is a frock is a frock, after all, however technically brilliant and dazzlingly provocative it might be. The V&A's motivation for staging this show is clearly c ynical," was one typically candid, and untypically fashion-esque, response. The suggestion was that our once-austere museums have sunk to soliciting the fashion industry, all for a quick roll in the hay with some celebrity glitz (and it does seem to satisfy: the morning after the opening night party of the "Versace at the V&A" exhibition, the Times breathlessly recorded that "Donatella swept in with Chelsea Clinton, Madonna and Lourdes".)

Is fashion art? The debate is neither new nor particularly useful, as it often leads to the worst kind of pretentious claptrap, with critics angrily defending either the sanctity of the Arts, capital A, or the legitimacy of couture. But it is difficult to sidestep the question at a time when fashion-based exhibitions are being staged across the country. Aside from the V&A's gushing homage to Versace, and "Rapture/David LaChapelle" at the Barbican, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is holding a retrospective of the former Vogue photographer John Deakin; "Unseen Vogue", a collection of photographs that never made it into the magazine, is at the Design Museum in London; even Manolo Blahnik, cobbler to the starlets, is getting his own show. America and Italy have a long tradition of designer retrospectives, but this is a relatively new concept in the UK, where history is viewed a little more traditionally, and the Brits are finding it difficult accepting the idea of Harvey Nichols as a potential cultura l hotbed.

Earlier in the year, the National Gallery staged another exhibition "Fabric of Vision", which looked at clothing in painting. This, went the general verdict, was art. The journalist from the Independent who was so scandalised by "Versace at the V&A", here writing in the Mail on Sunday, found "Fabric of Vision" "absorbing and amusing". So is fashion only art when it's rendered in oil paint?

Camille Paglia, for one, would disagree: "Fashion is a branch of the visual and performing arts," she once proclaimed. True, fashion can be studied as a socio-economic record of a society, or for its own aesthetic delights. Proust once wrote: "She was enveloped by her clothes as if by the delicate distilled apparatus of an entire civilisation." But the archetypal celebrity designer, the late Bill Blass, disagreed: "Fashion is a craft, and an expression of a period of time, but it is not an art." Personally, after visiting the "Rapture" and "Versace" exhibitions, I veer more towards Blass's point of view. Is fashion art? My equivocal, new Labour-esque answer is: sometimes. Indeed, this is partly due to the times we live in. At the entrance to "Rapture" is a giant ice-sculpture of Kate Moss by Marc Quinn: "You the viewer," reads the panting blurb, "are breathing in the molecules that were the sculpture as you read this, consuming Kate Moss." Well, something is being consumed here, but it's not necessarily Kate Moss. "Rapture", the Barbican claims, reflects "contemporary art's seduction by fashion". It does not. It reflects fashion and art's increasing reliance on celebrity to make money, and celebrity's consumption of the two industries. The poster for "Rapture" depicts a shirt by the self-consciously cerebral designer Martin Margiela, but it is the shirt's wearer, the actress Chloe Sevigny, who is the real focus. One particularly humourless room brings together homages to Moss by young British artists, including Polaroids by Tracey Emin of her and Moss looking a little tired and emotional. Quite how this fits under the umbrellas of art or fashion is unclear.

The more conceptual pieces in "Rapture", tenuously hinged on the fashion industry; such as Karin Schaefer's collage of fake nails to investigate "cultural and social variations of identity", reveal little about anything, let alone art or fashion. Similarly, when fashion anxiously tries to justify itself as "Art", mistakes are made. The worst examples of this are clothes decorated with paintings, such as the Versace dress adorned with a Lichtenstein print (frequently mentioned by the show's curator as proof of Versace's "passion for art"), or the designer Joe Casely-Hayford's T-shirt with a Chris Ofili print on view at "Rapture" ("available to buy from www.victoria-miro.com" adds the helpful placard). Such garments have no more artistic merit than a Monet T-shirt from a museum gift shop.

But most foolhardy of all is when fashion and art become distracted by celebrity. It is no surprise that the two exhibitions in London this season dedicated to Versace and Blahnik centre on designers with celebrity clientele. ("More than anyone else," Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, once said, "[Versace] was responsible for fashion becoming an entertainment." So there you have it: his fashion is not art.) Not only will this prove to style sceptics that fashion is a wholly superficial pursuit that is dumbing down the art world (which need not be the case), but it undermines the point of the whole enterprise, removing the element of style that art seeks from fashion, and the cerebralism fashion desires from art. Fashion and art should not, and need not, try so hard to justify their mutual compatibility.

It is the misfortune of "Rapture" that the Barbican has decided to stage the LaChapelle exhibition simultaneously because it spotlights the cul-de-sac into which today's art-as-fashion! fashion-as-art campaigners have backed themselves. David LaChapelle is one of the great celebrity photographers. Mario Testino, who had a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery last summer, takes adoring glossy photos of adored glossy celebrities. LaChapelle takes photos of celebrities, caricaturing their public appeal and mocking our adoration. Who knows how he managed to convince David Beckham to cover himself in oil and lick his shoulder like a most obedient rentboy, or persuade Britney Spears to cuddle Teletubby while pointing at her crotch? But his photos work because, beneath their high-octane colours, they each make a clear-sighted point: Beckham's appeal off the pitch has a lot to do with homoeroticism, Spears has always played to an appeal that is illegal in most countries.

The most common justification for the serious study of fashion is that it reflects the times in which we live in an aesthetically intriguing manner. LaChapelle's photos do that far more effectively than a blurry photo of Kate Moss, or a dress hanging in an empty hall. Moreover, they point out that the most revealing thing of all about us is that we think fashion tells us so much about ourselves. But irony, as "Rapture" demonstrates, will only take you so far, and it is lucky for LaChapelle that he also has a real understanding for art and fashion. Colours and clothes are used to transform the subjects, without kowtowing to the fame of the subject, or that of the clothing label. The works become * beautiful, ephemeral and fun. This is when fashion becomes art.

As I left the Barbican exhibitions, James Gooding walked in. Gooding, for those who aren'tregular readers of Heat and OK! magazines, is the model/photographer ex-boyfriend of Kylie Minogue; in other words, the perfect embodiment of dubious artistic talent allied with a tenuous connection to the fashion industry all wrapped up into one photogenic package and swabbed over with a celebrity connection polish. Along with everyone else in the gallery, I nearly gave myself whiplash. Can fashion-as-art exhibitions exist without celebrity padding? One day, perhaps. But some of us, it seems, lust get a little distracted sometimes.