When the cows came home

Not a good year for cows. For city folk like us, cows are a distant rumour, wafting the politics and panic of the mad-cow and foot-and-mouth diseases. But now they're coming to town, and for the next three months, the centre of London will be a grazing ground for herds of arty cows. CowParade is one of those well-oiled road shows where commerce, creativity and philanthropy get together with not a pat in sight.

"For art, for charity, for fun" is the purported triple purpose of the exercise. It's the brainchild of Walter Knapp, the Swiss who, with his sculptor son, Pascal, developed a series of cow templates cast out of glass fibre that become blank canvases for chosen artists and celebrities to decorate. Both Knapps have some modest history as artists. Knapp père was once president of the International Association of Window Dressers, which establishes his specific credentials. But the issue of whether CowParade is art remains unresolved.

The organisers claim it as the world's largest public art event. And with more than 150 bovines on display, and another six cities around the world lining up for more cow action, they might not be far wrong. The cows are sponsored individually, and thereafter auctioned for charity. In London, Child-line will benefit from the proceeds, as well as the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, which supports farmers who suffered from the foot-and-mouth crisis.

Walter Knapp first set out his cow stall in Zurich in 1998, but the event really took off in America a couple of years later. I remember walking through New York when it dawned on me, somewhere in Central Park, that I'd just encountered a cow, and I'd been seeing cow after cow all weekend. First indications were that they were beneath the attention of the New York smart art crowd, but one had only to mention them and the same crowd would start rabbiting on about their neighbourhood cow until - well, until the cows came home.

They seemed to crop up everywhere. Their cumulative effect on the viewer was to disrupt the flow of thought. What struck me was the extent to which people noticed them and began to treat them in a way that public sculptors hardly dare to dream of - with respect. No one vandalised the New York cows. No anti-globalisation protesters daubed them with turf mohicans, as British protesters did to the Churchill statue in Westminster.

The cows had earned their place to graze in the city by being themselves, placid and dumb.

In London, the cows will be seen in all the right places. The Royal Opera House, Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square will witness a bovine bivouac. The Ritz and Four Seasons hotels are housing a couple more. Each has a user-friendly name, and there's pun after pun with the titling: they'll all have their own names, from Beefeater to Cower Bridge.

The Knapps have encouraged submissions from artists all over the country (Patrick Hughes's cow is called Martha, Andrew Logan's, Peace Cow), and solicited a few celebrity doodles for good measure (Esther Rantzen, Des Lynam, Carol Smillie). Not many well-known artists have responded. After all, why would Damien Hirst want to paint a fake cow when he's sliced the real thing into sections and put it in formaldehyde? No, these cows have strong graphic appeal, but they won't make it into art history. Well-meaning it may be, but Cow-Parade is hardly a forum for deconstructive aesthetic debate. Nor does it need to be.

There were always cows in art, from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Stubbs's best of breed when he wasn't watching the horses. The Cow-Parade cows are at their refulgent, vulgar best when they aspire to being nothing more than whimsical city markers.

They inhabit that grey area where the aesthetic negotiates kitsch. I see a passing parallel to Jeff Koons's espousal of animal caricatures - the so-called Banality Series, or the celebrated 40-ft-high Puppy - designed to evoke objects we loved in childhood and have repressed ever since. With Koons, it's a sophisticated enterprise. It has to do with embracing forsaken desires, or so he says. Whatever the theories, Koons extends the limits of what art might seem to mean.

There is no such meaning to be invested in CowParade. Many British artists have submitted designs. Following the handful of teaser-cows already out and about, they will, from next Monday, see their ideas populating the streets. And in many ways they will achieve a greater level of public cognition than other art. I have a friend who intends to see every one.