It doesn’t seem long since cultural critics were sitting around tables on late-night arts shows debating whether Bob Dylan was a better poet than John Keats. Mercifully, they don’t do that any more, but the question hasn’t gone away, it has only changed form.

When the Victoria and Albert’s Kylie show opens next month, those same critics will be asking whether Kylie is a superior style icon to, say, Coco Chanel. Such is the logic of today’s unions of art and music and fashion and design, of “high” art and “low”, that it can be hard to distinguish what matters, or what can be reasonably brought together and compared. As the commentator John Seabrook noted a few years ago, we no longer have high art and low, we just have the buzz, and the buzz is where it’s at, whether in a box at the opera or the mosh pit of a rock gig.

But things can go too far, can’t they? This week an exhibition opens at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds entitled Figuring Space, which looks at “the shared terrain of furniture and sculpture”. It slices through the history of Modernism, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, and contains some provocative ideas. The show suggests that the architect Mies van der Rohe often treated furniture and sculpture almost interchangeably; it takes two of the chairs that Mies designed to represent the visit of the Spanish monarchs to the German National Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exhibition in 1929 (his now classic “Barcelona chairs”), and puts them alongside Henry Moore’s King and Queen, from 1952, his monumental sculpture of homely, surrealist royalty; and it closes with more comparisons between chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, Arne Jacobson and reclining figures by Moore.

On paper, it sounds absurd, the crass result of a stubborn determination to level the field between fine art and design; in the galleries, however, it may well look much richer. Certainly Penelope Curtis, the institute’s director and the curator of the show, is persuasive.

The idea came to her when she visited the Barcelona Pavilion and was struck by the presence of a rather old-fashioned, figurative sculpture, and also by the chairs. “My feeling is that Mies had quite a traditional view of what sculpture did,” she says. “He thought it offered a higher, condensed interpretation of what it means to be human, and he would never have thought that furniture did that.” However, Mies tended to install old-fashioned figurative sculptures in his rooms as a means of lending drama to them, of underlining their shape, their entrances and exits. It’s an attitude that in some sense equates them with furniture. Curtis isn’t saying that Mies thought a chair was as good as a sculpture, she is simply suggesting that the language of sculpture and that of design bore a lot of similarities in this period.

Curtis then came up with the idea of the throne room: “The Barcelona chairs and Moore’s King and Queen aren’t normally seen together, but there are interesting comparisons to be made. They’re both pairs, they’re both about royalty, and they both go back to Egyptian prototypes.”

If Mies’s notion of the proximity of furniture and sculpture was perhaps unconscious, for a later generation of designers such an idea was much clearer. “By the time you get to the late 1950s there is a genuine equivalence between the way people might place an Eames lounge chair in a room and how they might place a Henry Moore reclining figure,” says Curtis. “If you look at a two or three-part Henry Moore figure from the late 1950s or early 1960s and you look at similar Eames chairs, you see the same kind of breakage in the figure, the same interest in the organic profile, the way the figure is weighted and how it rests.”

Art and design have always been in flux and what we are seeing now is the latter’s resurgence. This has taken various forms, often with a conceptual, curatorial tone to them; for example, when the Cuban-American artist-designer Jorge Pardo created an installation for the Dia Centre in New York in 2000. It had lime and lemon tiles sprawling out of the galleries and into the bookshop, uniting some of his own designs for lamps, a full-scale model of a Volkswagen Beetle and, in the bookshop, furniture by Alvar Aalto and Marcel Breuer.

So common are these kinds of marriages that a neologism, DesignArt, has arrived to describe them. Tobias Rehberger, an artist who has made some interesting work relating art and design, proposed to the Judd Foundation recently that he temporarily convert one of the late sculptor’s outdoor pieces into a bar, thus producing a new, collaborative artwork. They politely refused.

Maybe the foundation felt that Rehberger’s suggestion was impertinent and satirical, yet much of the new DesignArt has incisive points to make. The American artist Joe Scanlan in the early 1990s produced a series called Nesting Bookcases, which contain a miniaturised echo of the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, from 1920-21. Scanlan’s desire was to preserve the form of the Utopian monument while emphasising how such ideals have been domesticated and made over into a fine art work for the enjoyment of the wealthy in the West.

We can only welcome more work like Scanlan’s, for as the contemplation of art becomes just another entertainment option, strange things will happen. Things that once had their own assured place in the cultural firmament will become dislodged, fall, or join new constellations in the vast open sky that is the buzz. One just hopes that when this happens there will be something left outside this fashionable spectacle — be it art, music, maybe even plates of food — with enough distance for us to be able to look back on it with a critical eye.

Figuring Space: Furniture/Sculpture from Mies to Moore, Henry Moore Institute, 74 The Headrow, Leeds (www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk 0113-246 7467), Jan 18-April 1