NEWS of the fire destroying a vast collection of work by Britpack artists, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, the Chapman brothers and Gillian Ayres, is bringing joy to the philistines who would have paid good money to torch it themselves.

Not since a Tower Hamlets council bulldozer demolished Rachel Whiteread’s House 1993-94 on the day it won the Turner Prize have so many landscape-loving art-idiots felt so self-righteous and so vindicated.

The visual arts make the British nervous. We don’t know what we are looking at and we don’t know how to look. Recent rows over the Trafalgar Square plinth have seen us mooning over “proper” sculpture, and denouncing Marc Quinn for having the cheek to call his marble statue of the disabled, pregnant Alison Lapper, a work of art.

Even Sir Roy Strong, who knows a thing or two, wanted an equestrian statue of the young Queen Victoria to occupy the empty plinth. The joke is that if you ask anyone to name what is on the other plinths, they don’t have a clue. The British like their art invisible.

The great strength of Brit Art in recent years is that is has forced the debate on what art is and who it is for. Even the tabloids, not known for their in-depth art debates, have had to talk about Tracey and her tent and her bed, and Damien and his formaldehyde friends. People who would never step inside an art gallery have been to the Saatchi Gallery. Go there, and the room is alive with talk. Of course some people think it’s rubbish, but they are as energetically combated by those who are finding something in such images for the first time.

A VIBRANT culture needs living art, and it needs all of us to be in dialogue with that art. More people are coming to the visual arts now than ever before, and I believe that this is because of the brand new way that Brit Art has engaged the popular imagination.

If culture is to stay alive and not become a sentimental museum, it must encourage a supply of controversial art. It is right that we question the art that is made today, but it is equally right that we question ourselves; is our response honest or kneejerk? Are we open to what we see, or are we conditioned by habit and assumption?

The informal Constable appreciation society forget that their hero had tomatoes thrown at his pictures, and that they were considered crude daubs by those who complained that Constable did not understand chiaroscuro, and simply laid one primary colour next to another without grading. He also took his easel outdoors and painted from nature — which was pretty shocking to the studio artists who would never have dreamt of getting their feet wet.

When the critic for The Times reviewed Roger Fry’s landmark exhibition at the Grafton galleries in 1911, featuring work by Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso, he declared that the frames were worth more than the pictures.

Rubbing our hands over the charred remains of Brit Art is not far from cheering at the burning of books. Anyone who is glad to see creative energy and serious thought go up in flames is an enemy of culture and the worst kind of yob. I do not care whether or not all of the destroyed works were of equal value or whether all of them would have stood the test of time. I care that we in Britain are making some of the most interesting art in the world. We should be proud of that. To lose it in a careless fire is a loss to all of us because — and this is where the philistines get it hopelessly wrong — the art of our own time is a living bridge to the art of the past and the future. Burning bridges, like burning books, is a favourite sport of barbarians everywhere.

Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel is Lighthousekeeping