A lot actually. I went to the show hesitatingly, embarrassed at being one more voyeur in a potential freak show. The signs were all there. The long lines, the high ticket price (inclusive of audio by David Bowie), the posters warning prospective viewers that the exhibits could cause 'shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety.' Not as presumptuous a warning as one would think considering some of the items on display : real flies emerging from real maggots, eyes gazing out of a human heart, prepubescent girls sprouting bi-sexualorgans, a portrait of a child killer in baby hands, an Afro-American Madonna with an elephant dung breast.

Notoriety though should be forewarning enough. Given the oohing and the aahing and the cutting and the jabbing that had gone on in the press following the city mayor's well-publicised opposition to the show, every fervent visitor thrusting his $ 9.50 at the ticket window knew full well what to expect. And yet neither I nor, I suspect, observing the expressions around me, much of the audience, was really prepared for the actual unveiling. It was not so much a piece here or a piece there (though there was that too : I had to force myself to look at Damien Hirst's bisected animals by telling myself "if I can eat it I can look at it") but the show as a whole. I found it disturbing. A lifesize representation of a ma-n's face, with every pore and hair alive; a replica of the naked corpse of the artist's father real in every detail, yet child size; giant pictures of fleshy women with the heads cut off, `twofried eggs and a kebab', slang for a woman's body slapped upon a table. Disgusting? It could have been but for the irony (as self-assured as Brit glam rock: Queen or even Bowie himself).

Teasing, provocative, warm even. Chris Ofili's Madonna, the painting that caused the greatest furore in fact, unlike the traditional Virgin Mary seemed to invite as much as exude love, the dung breast exposing an almost girl-like vulnerability.

If these reasserted a theme that to me at least pointed at universal mortality and the sameness of flesh, skin, blood, there were pieces that indicted contemporary excesses. Hadrian Pigott mocked the use of detergents more toxic than human grime. Mona Hatoum's `Deep Throat' was an elegant table setting till you looked at the plate and found yourself gazing stomach churningly into the expanding and contracting larynx of the artist. Effective. Confrontational. Thought provoking. Till you thought about it and wondered : are the issues profound or are they embarrassingly trite. Whyare Britain's best young artists preoccupied with the idea of equalization? And is this really art? One need not agree with the need for art to be pleasant or elevate. But isn't this treading dangerously on the preserve of the journalist and the filmmaker? Adam Chotzko for instance showed pictures of people who thought they looked like God - an idea tailor-made for glossy journalism. Richard Billingham's shots of his vivid lower class family could have come straight from PBS or Oliver Stone.

Furthermore, if one expects art at least to last, then what does one say of the child killer Myra Hindley portrait? Ten years on or even two who will remember her? Will it make sense?

These questions are not new. They are as perennial probably as the new forms art can take. Yet they dangle like shards of glass sometimes catching this light, sometimes that. Is the artist a victim of the times or is he manipulating the viewer to confront his or her own notions of art and indeed of high and low whether it is in termsof class, media, sensibility etc. All this is significant in the context of the current debate over the perceived dumbing down of culture in the west. Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion is scathing about the present-day amusement park aspect of the arts claiming that "high art's serious accomplishments are packaged in ways that can appeal to the ignorant" and that "aesthetic standards have been abandoned in the interest of social documentary." The New Yorker, meanwhile sees merit in that. Commenting specifically on Sensation it maintained: "It's a matter not of `high' and `low' but of inside and outside: cooking to engage both the gourmets in the kitchen and the rabble in the soup line."

Desirable or undesirable? An argument that I'm still trying to resolve. Meanwhile let me describe one of the more startling exhibits. Marc Quinn's head made of blood (real blood that he extracted over five months out of his own body, all 8 pints, the average amount required by a human body) and then poured into acast of his own head. The sculpture is kept alive by a refrigeration unit. It suggests, we are informed, the precariousness of the human condition and our reliance on technology. One pull of the plug and - plop!