Well-meaning people who are opposed to religious fundamentalism often still sleep-walk into a form of their very own: art worship. Art worship is different from its more sober form - art appreciation - which anyone who has ever enjoyed a good novel or simply stared at a stunning painting has experienced.

The industries surrounding art - criticism, reviewing, arts academies and courses - have given art the status of a secular religion. I apologise for regurgitating ideas from John Carey's stunning polemic, What Good Are The Arts? (incensed by the title, I later felt the shock and awe of being brought round), but art worship can be as blind a faith as any other. And as any atheist knows, faith means nothing until you can prove it.

So what does art prove?

We talk about the soul, the truth, the spirituality, the uplifting or transcendental qualities of great works. But these only exist in so far as we supply them ourselves. Thom Yorke once sang, "Just 'cos you feel it, doesn't mean it's there." Our atheist would argue that the spirituality that we sense in a cathedral is a combination of spectacle, belief and atmosphere. They're designed that way. There is a performance, but not the essence, of spirituality.

Say this about a great work of art and you risk offending, the same way the religious are offended. You are written off as a philistine: the art world's equivalent of a heathen.

For worshippers of literature, for example, there is a God and the Son: Shakespeare and Joyce, about whom no dissent is permitted - only endless, arcane study of what these sacred texts mean. So much for freedom of thought if admitting you don't like Joyce becomes a confession. I have a first-class degree and a masters in English Literature, and I've read plenty of difficult books, so if I can't enjoy Finnegan's Wake, or large parts of Ulysses, where does the fault lie? With me? Or with an author who was lucky enough to write baffling, unreadable prose during a period in which it was the vogue to elevate baffling, unreadable prose? Ditto various other modernist works designed principally to exclude the masses.

A novel or poem which requires a university education - or an expert on hand to 'explain' it to you - might represent a failure of communication to most people. Instead, if you don't 'get' it, you're just not in the club. The arts are as perniciously exclusive and stratified as any other area of our society, but this is disguised as "cultural refinement" or "self-improvement".

There exists a canon of holy works - from Homer to Rushdie - chosen by a cabal of priest-like academics in order to demonstrate and disseminate their conception of great literature. What are university English departments if not faith schools, in which study of Coleridge's use of the semi-colon (I exaggerate, but not much), and in which fashionable buzz-words and theories (post-structuralism, anyone?), foment an occult, enclosed community that says nothing to an outside readership?

I remember a lecturer at university who banned us from saying that we had enjoyed a novel, since enjoyment was not what literary study was about. "Can we start from the presumption that this is a great novel," he told us, "and that 'enjoyment' is simply inherent?"

Well, no, because I didn't enjoy some of those books. And the ones that I did enjoy I eventually killed, chloroforming and pinning them like butterflies in my essays, taking them apart to see how they worked.

Art exists for one reason: to bring pleasure. Stretching back to oral folk culture, stories were democratic in their nature, bonding communities in a shared experience. Everyone had a tale to tell around the fire; the audience could decide for themselves if it was good or not.

But when storytelling reached its fixed, written form in literature, it became possessed by the reading classes, a means of distancing them from the illiterate hordes. It was now property. What happened when the masses learnt to read? So-called good taste became a way of beating them back down. It has remained this way ever since. Even I - shaped by English departments since I was 12 - couldn't help but fall into this trap in my Jeffrey Archer blog.

As Tom Edge argues, literature was also hijacked by capitalism, which turned it into an industry, this time for commercial rather than cultural gain. And we had another elite: publishers and booksellers who kept the profit from the once-free communion between storyteller and audience.

Perhaps the internet is finally changing that, handing means of production and reception back to the majority.

Great works of art do not exist objectively: only subjectively. While we labour under the illusion of the former, "good taste" will remain a conservative force.