A Home Of Your Own

Le Facteur Cheval was a postman in the South of France who spent his free time in the early 20th century constructing a dream palace out of concrete, shells and odds and ends. Cheval based his palace on images of Oriental cities, Renaissance grottoes and cathedrals. It sprouted up like a vast coral reef and there was no reason for it to stop growing except the death of its creator. André Breton visited the Builder Cheval and anointed him a hero of Surrealism. Photographs of his palace subsequently appeared in La Revolution Surréaliste.

If he lived in Britain today, Cheval would more likely write to the BBC and ask to appear on Fantasy Rooms than build a palace of his own. Fantasy Rooms is the latest in the contemporary TV genre of leisure-based, factual entertainment programmes, produced - like its forerunners Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and Ground Force - by Peter Bazalgette and his company Bazal productions. Fantasy Rooms stars Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, the romantically long-maned designer who regularly helps people to redesign their neighbours' houses in Changing Rooms. In the new programme, people ask him to create their 'fantasy room' - a place for the imagination to live. The tragicomedy of the show is that the 'punters' (as Bazalgette calls them) cannot create such a space for themselves, but must have it made for them by an interior designer on television. The programme enacts a double death: of creativity and privacy.

In one episode a woman of New Age beliefs in Brighton wanted Llewellyn-Bowen to make her a room 'like heaven'. He took her to the town's Fabrica art gallery to see a Minimalist white cube. Was that her idea of heaven? No, it turned out she wanted something with painted clouds and angels. He based the clouds on Regency ceilings in the Brighton Pavilion; he went to Winchester Cathedral to see what angels look like in Medieval art. Throughout the series, Llewellyn-Bowen was advised by academics and experts - an Egyptologist taught him how to create an Egyptian tomb in a suburban house; a canon of Winchester Cathedral explained about angels. One expert isn't enough to get your fantasy room right: you need a whole regiment of designers and art historians to ensure your imagination is in accord with good taste.

This genre of television is not about wild untrammelled fantasy but about opening your home to a team of experts. In the 16th century, neighbours performed the obscene ritual of the Charivari outside the house of someone seen as a deviant. Today, we send the designers around. If you have a strange, eccentric idea of building a Japanese garden or a grotto, these people will persuade you that what you really want is a 'deck'. And if interior designers can barge in and tell you how to do it right, why not artists? That seems to be the thinking behind At Home with Art, a joint venture by the Tate Gallery and the DIY chain Homebase which has generated both a touring exhibition and a line of home and garden products. There was even a BBC programme about it. The conceit was to get leading artists to spend time with 'ordinary people' so they could create objects for the home. The assumption is that artists are experts with something to deliver; there is no question of the tables being turned. The resulting products are self-consciously surreal yet tamely mass-reproducible. Fancy a Tony Cragg garden tool, an Antony Gormley clothes-peg or an Anish Kapoor lamp?

The artists who played the role of populist designer for the Tate Gallery/Homebase project went into homes in the same way as Llewellyn-Bowen in Fantasy Rooms, defining their clients as typical in some way and seeking a shared idea of what might be a nice object to have around the house. The scheme sounded the death-knell of any imagination - designing by consensus through dialogue. Explaining how he worked with the Whittington family to design a beach towel, David Mach (he of the wanky brick train in Darlington) observed: 'if you're going to make a work of art that's going to reach somebody - lots of somebodies - then you have to start with people. People are the most important part of a project like this.' The results of At Home With Art feel tight, cold and unexciting; not a single kitsch assault on 'good' taste - just bland attempts to domesticate art and address a Blairite image of the People. Similarly, when a young woman in Fantasy Rooms had one room of her house transformed into an Egyptian tomb, there was a huge emphasis on her friends' views just to prove she wasn't some weirdo loner. You certainly couldn't get on the programme wanting something that can't be described.

What designer leisure programmes and At Home With Art miss about the world of interiors is that it is a place where art can disintegrate into hobbydom and where hobbies can generate art: in other words where 'art' as a category dissolves. Why should a funny-shaped garden implement by Tony Cragg be considered better art than one encrusted with bits of colourful stuff by an eccentric? Why should Mach's beach towels be more interesting than the craft my aunt pursues at the Women's Institute? Because they are professional artists? If this is all art is now - a professional expertise like interior decorating - then art may turn out to be less interesting than the 'funny' hobbies people still get up to. In the world of private, unkempt leisure, you never know when the absolutely new might appear.

When the immigrant labourer Simon Rodia built the Watts Towers in Los Angeles during the early 50s he wasn't working from a manual, or by rules, or for the cameras - he wasn't trying to fit in. His do-it-yourself dream has come to be cherished for its originality and uniqueness, its quality of being something that never existed before. Rodia didn't need anyone's permission, and he didn't need an expert's approval. When his towers were complete, or when he felt they were, he didn't stick around to explain them. He handed the property deed to a neighbour and just went away.