On a long bus journey in Mexico I got chatting to a passenger. When I told him I was from England he exclaimed: “Ah the Beatles! Liverpool!” It was a reminder that Liverpool truly has a global artistic reputation.

On hearing that Tate Liverpool is staging an exhibition to coincide with the city’s 800th anniversary called Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde I was extremely tempted to fall into the lazy habits of the metropolitan chattering classes and give the city a good verbal kicking. After all, here is a place usually portrayed as having an overdeveloped sense of entitlement because it gave the world the Beatles and its teams are quite good at football.

The title of the show is an ironic misquote of the American poet Allen Ginsburg, who enjoyed the vibrancy of the city on a visit in 1965. What he did say was that Liverpool “is at this present moment the centre of consciousness of the human universe. Wow, wouldn’t it be great if they built a cathedral in the shape of a spaceship because Jesus was an astronaut?” Ginsberg stayed with the poet and painter Adrian Henri, who came to prominence alongside his fellow Mersey poets Roger McGough and Brian Patten, and the painters Maurice Cockrill and John Baum. Henri lived in the city’s answer to the Left Bank, Liverpool 8, an area of decaying Georgian buildings that he describes as being full of “families of happy Jamaicans, sullen out-of-work Irishmen, poets, queers, thieves, painters, university students, lovers . . .”

By 1967 the myth of Liverpool as a font of creativity welling up out of urban deprivation was well established. The Telegraph magazine celebrated “the Sound of Liverpool 8, its dialect, poetry, music art and happenings”, accompanied by Don McCullin’s gritty photos of kids playing in rundown streets.

It is the great photographs in the book accompanying the Tate show that stand out for me. They chronicle the changing perceptions of Liverpool over the past half century, from Edward Chambre-Hardman’s Where great ships are built , which shows the vast hulk of an aircraft carrier looming over a housing estate (where the men who built it probably lived) to Martin Parr’s series The Last Resort, whose style and viewpoint reflect the combination of fascination and revulsion often directed at the garish indulgences of the working class.

Liverpool’s hard-left council set itself up in opposition to the Conservative Government and suffered more than most during the economic downturns of the Seventies and Eighties, and perhaps because of this the people developed a reputation for being chippy. A thin theatrical self-confidence often evolves as a defence mechanism. Demanding respect is a trope, usually counterproductive, developed by communities who feel powerless. Jeff Nuttall, the head of fine art at Liverpool College of Art during its Sixties golden era, said: “There was nothing toffee-nosed about Liverpool, Liverpool was a ‘real’ place.” Inverted snobbery can be another manifestation.

Now Liverpool is entering a new renaissance. Aspirations to wood-floored loft lifestyles have even filtered through to my favourite Liverpudlians, the Royle family, who in their Christmas special were very proud that their living room had been “laminated”.

The city now has a biennale and will be the European Capital of Culture in 2008. City fathers hope a destination rebranded through the arts will charm visitors into investing business capital or choosing Liverpool for a weekend city break. But this is not going to be the natural flowering of the Sixties, when artists grew like weeds out of the bomb sites and abandoned dockyards. It is a rebirth involving much political intervention, about as natural as a civic flower bed spelling out “Welcome to Liverpool” in Day-Glo petunias.

A habit of the mainstream that leaves me feeling queasy is its exploitation of nostalgia for subcultural boom times. With howling beatniks or angry punks now safely in the past, the powers-that-be hope to cash in on creative rebellions that were at best ignored and at worst seen as illegal. City hall wants to capitalise on the image of Liverpool as a thriving bohemian destination for tourists and investment, a place of authentic, ever so slightly daring, cultural thrill rides. But as they do this, they develop away the very resources that give rise to these phenomena, that is rundown property where young artists can make noise, mess and little money.

Liverpool wants to revisit its glory days, but they filled in the Cavern Club and used the ground for a car park. Matthew Street, a creative hotbed in the 1980s, faded into fake Irish pubs and pedestrianisation. It may be romantic to think that interesting art communities have to be unofficial, but I fear that City Hall is hoping for the Bilbao effect. It may end up with a Pizza Express.

Bill Drummond in his engaging essay, also in the accompanying book, thinks that spontaneous subcultures may be gobbled up by the mainstream at such a rate now that the underground exists only in “paedophile chatrooms, white supremacist websites and Islamic fundamentalist bookshops”. Now there’s an idea for a novel angle on attracting tourism.

Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde is at Tate Liverpool (0151-702 7400; tate.org.uk/liverpool), until September 9

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