Call me old-fashioned, but I might have imagined “art for babies” as an insult to be hurled at the infantile tendency in contemporary art movements. Back in 1918, the Dada manifesto complained about “learned journalists” calling their work “an art for babies”. More recently some high-minded critics have said much the same about (nursery?) schools of British art involving dead animals, big dots, dung or Lego bricks.

I discover, however, that “art for babies” could itself be an embryonic movement — and a state-sponsored one at that. An Isle of Wight hospital is putting on an Art for Babies exhibition aimed at art-lovers aged from birth to six months, promoted by Healing Arts of the local NHS. Meanwhile, along the South Coast in Brighton, the Arts Council for England is funding a bigger Art for Babies show at the Jubilee Library during the Brighton Festival and Fringe in May. This one is for a slightly older crowd, advertised as the “first ever art exhibition aimed specifically at children aged nought to three years”.

Now, as a parent (the magic words), I am all for family-friendly culture. But I’m afraid I snorted like a grumpy old man at the Brighton exhibition’s suggestion that toddlers pawing expensive artworks will “teach them about light, texture and movement, and encourage them to explore some of these themes themselves by interacting with the pieces or attending the workshops”. Theme-exploring interactive art workshops for babies sounds like a send-up from the scathing Modern Parents cartoon in Viz (not perhaps a cultural allusion the Arts Council of England would recognise).

So what is in the Brighton Art for Babies exhibition and what might they get out of it? There is certainly nothing babyish about the grown-up artistry that Shella Parkin, the exhibition organiser, has brought together. Jeremy Lord’s brilliant light-boxes entice crawling babies to explore their rainbow colours and images from children’s stories. Martin Hayward-Harris’s charming animals would be cuddly if they were not solid sculptures, but we are promised that children are free to “touch, smell and lick them if they want to”. Ditto Andrew Wood’s “super-tactile” reliefs that look like bright hybrids of shellfish and fish.

James Watt, a kenetic sculptor, contributes one of his fine metal Artbots — a solar-powered dragonfly — and a stampede of paper animals suspended from the ceiling. Wisely, his are the only exhibits that toddlers cannot touch. And there is Jessica Albarn’s Brainbow Ring — a 6ft battery-powered conical dome of a hands-on (and shoeless feet-on) installation, with activity areas that combine colour and touch, but no smells.

It looks like good fun. But what does showing babies shapes and colours have to do with art education? Parkin says that the naivety of young children makes them a special audience; they offer artists a “completely honest response” because they have “no knowledge of what the world thinks of a piece, they are not burdened by the idea that they ought to like this or that”. But the point about babies is that they are not “burdened” by ideas at all. And art appreciation surely must involve some intellectual engagement beyond sensory stimulation.

It is no surprise to see officialdom backing Art for Babies , since its themes chime with the current orthodoxy in child development — that what happens in the first three years is decisive. It must follow that, if you can get them into art while they are in nappies, they will be art-lovers for life. As with all determinist notions of development, that seems questionable.

Of course it is important to stimulate babies. But unless they are locked in a dark cupboard all day they are surrounded by so many stimuli already that an art show is unlikely to make much difference. They could experience colour, texture, taste and sound from a stick of Brighton rock, if kids down there were allowed to eat such unhealthy stuff these days.

Then again, maybe an exhibition like this is really for the parents anyway. Parkin says that becoming a mother made her realise that the festival offered little to Brighton’s army of smart young families. Albarn says that her creation of Brainbow was “born out of frustration following the birth of my first child”, when she found herself “in a very isolated situation, cut off from my contemporaries”.

Many mothers and fathers will recognise that problem. One thing we often did to get out of the house when our daughters were small was to push a buggy around London’s classic art galleries, pretending it was for their benefit. When they got a little older, maybe such visits did help to give them an interest in painting — but by raising their sights to see a world beyond their immediate experience. By contrast, art for babies seems to involve lowering art’s horizons to toddler level — and getting parents to crawl around with them. There is fine work in Brighton’s show. It should prove a good place to meet likeminded parents while the little ones run riot. It might be better to leave it at that, and forget the art-educational pretensions. Art for Babies runs at the Jubilee Library, Brighton (01273 290800) from May 5-28. A different

Art for Babies show is at St Mary’s Hospital, Newport, Isle of Wight (01983 534184), until June 1.

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