I have been thinking about the role of the gallery recently. It started when I was curating City Fabric for the Fire Station Artists Studios in Dublin in late September. I used different sites around the city: Christchurch Cathedral, Trinity, Greek Temple in Seán McDermott Street and of course the streets of the city. Some people might have seen Mr. Individual Walking. He was on a two-and-a-half-meter high plinth outside Pearse Street Garda station.

The response from the nonart world was wonderful. People who would never go to a gallery stopped in the street and talked to the artists. Bell ringers came to the cathedral especially to ring out a piece of artwork. The open buses that show people around Dublin made one of the works part of their tour. The Garda even turned their security cameras on one work and made a video recording, which they gave to the artist. The people for whom the work was produced certainly saw the work and engaged with it.

The only dissenting voices came from within the art world. Why had we not given out press releases four weeks ahead of time was the cry from the specialist press. Have they ever heard of breaking news? We didn't know about it cried the insider art world. But this was public art. Not art in the streets for an art audience.

Back North I visited the galleries. There was some 'do-gooder art' with artists working with deprived or should that be depraved groups. At its best this kind of art can be excellent, creating interesting work and encouraging interaction. It can also be condescending if the artists involved are not very careful.

Then I went to see Out Of Sorts: Perspectives 2001 at the Ormeau Baths Gallery.1 There was a lot of video work, some of which simply transferred what was outside on the streets to inside the gallery. It really only becomes art if we accept that the gallery is an élitist place with the ability to confer the title of art to anything that comes through its doors. Cathedrals of art are what they should now be known as.

There was also some New Age Conceptualism on show with ideas typed out on A4 sheets. Some of the ideas/art were to do very ordinary everyday things and stage them in the gallery. Once again, this work depended on transference of context to make it art. This turns the actual act of art making into an elitist practice.

So perhaps it is time to question the role of the gallery. The gallery will always appeal to a minority of people and there is nothing wrong with that. Even football appeals to a minority as fewer that 50% of the population go to football matches. In fact I would like to see galleries take on difficult shows, shows that perhaps may not get great numbers of people coming through the doors but which would extend our thinking about art. Rather than becoming a quasi-religious venue using faith and belief in a system to anoint work with a particular status, the gallery should become a place for experimentation and exchange of ideas.

If the gallery refused to confer the status of art on the banal and the recording of everyday life, where should this work go? s with it. Public art can be exciting and rewarding when audiences are not treated in a condescending way, when the streets are not used to show work to an art audience. The general public can be a great audience but thankfully they don't put up with the crap a gallery audience artfully accepts. So let's make Public Art for the public and use galleries for that minority which has a particular interest in having a dialogue with the visual arts.