Transgressions: the offences of art, by Anthony Julius

Shocking art may thrill punters - and critics - but it can't destroy taboos, argues Deborah Levy

It is hard to work out what kind of justice the eminent lawyer and author Anthony Julius is after in this meditation on taboo-breaking and transgression in contemporary art. His tone is sorrowful rather than didactic, not exactly Hamlet but not Brian Sewell, either. One feels that what Julius wants from art is what Hegel wanted from history – "the unfolding of human understanding" – but that, instead, he feels transgressed against by the "conceptual lawlessness" of contemporary art that "celebrates and practises cruelty".

From the outraged public response to Manet's painting Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe in 1867, in which a naked woman and a clothed man picnic on the grass, to the "scandal" caused by the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition 130 years later, Julius reckons that artists have arrogantly gone out of their way to reject received ideas about morality, aesthetics, law, society and religion, "all boundaries have been crossed, all taboos broken, all limits violated". He asks, what happens to us, the viewers, when we gaze on the acclaimed transgressive work of the last century: Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Damien Hirst's decaying shark, Gilbert and George's Spit on Shit, or Helen Chadwick's Loop my Loop – a pig's bladder plaited with shiny golden hair?

Faced with such an assaultive array, Julius feels we lose something sacred and valuable, and might even be in psychic danger as we retreat into the numbness of our increasing unshockability. He insists, moreover, that artists should not have a special freedom from responsibility, because taboo-breaking "can violate our sensibilities. It can force us into the presence of the ugly, the bestial, the vicious, the menacing." Much more interestingly, he asserts that this art demoralises us with a nihilism "falsely presented as something liberating".

It would be fascinating to know what exactly it is, amid all this nihilism, to which the author yearns to feel connected. This seems to me to be the hole at the centre of his book. What is it that transgressive art has taken away from him; why does he feel defiled; and why is any of this important for our culture at the beginning of the 21st century?

Despite the 234 pages of assembled evidence for his case, I still don't know. In fact, I doubt if Julius knows either. Had his book been a more honest search to find this out, it might have been a compelling read.

It is also hard to fathom why Julius flatteringly bestows so much power on the artist. The fact that a few artists have violated taboos does not mean that these taboos no longer exist. Taboos are entrenched, resilient, and for good reason. It's not as if the many thousands of curious people who were provoked and entertained by the Sensation show have somehow been immunised to the breaking of taboos.

Audiences are not as fragile as Julius thinks, nor do they take well to being infantilised and patronised. Despite Adorno's epigram "All art is an uncommitted crime", try telling the victims of Willesden shoot-outs that the worst thing you could meet down a dark alley is an artist.

It is, however, for the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman that Julius reserves some of his more heartfelt writing in his best chapter, "The end of transgressive art". This is how he describes their installation, Hell: "The artists have choreographed torments in arrested time. Small figures in Nazi costume, many wearing swastika armbands, are subjected to physical abuse by naked, mutant-like men and women. Bloody torsos are suspended, men are jerked, puppet-like, by wires threaded through their hands, while others are pulled apart, limb by limb ... these are scenes of silent, petrified horror."

Apparently, critics have argued that the artists "have fathomed the depth of the horror of the Holocaust". Julius finds this praise misconceived: "The cultural correlatives of Hell are not the counter-memorials of the Holocaust but schlock-horror movies." Only an art practice that is "allusive, modest, fragile, provisional" can address aspects of the Holocaust. He praises Christian Boltanski's lost, out-of-focus, unrecognisable faces as "an art that meets its subject at the mind's limits".

Julius argues that "the only way forward is an 'anti-transgressive art', one committed to the construction of criteria rather than the breaking of taboos". While I respect the heat of his writing here, it is nevertheless unforgivably bullying to attempt to legislate exactly what kind of art can, and cannot, respond to the Holocaust. If new generations want to try "to retrieve the meaning of the lives that were extinguished", good for them. Julius does not own exclusive rights to the tragedies of our last century.

The strange thing about this book is that the writer, despite himself, seems so very drawn to the experiments of the artists he berates. He is compelled, if not electrified, by their visions, perversions, formal enquiries – both excited and incited. It is as if he has had to suppress his own obvious pleasure and intellectual engagement with trangressive art, while at the same time moaning, "Violate me, violate me... no, no... yes, yes." Tricky.

Deborah Levy wrote the 2001 Joseph Beuys lectures for The Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford