A MAN In a bear suit, wandering round an art gallery.

A sign made out of scaffolding and illuminated lightbulbs declaring: "There will be no miracles here." Three "chambers" with some holes. Yes folks, it's Turner Prize time again. And what a prize: £40,000, tonnes of publicity, plus, if you're canny like previous winners Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, the chance to become a millionaire celeb.

But - all together now - is it art? Can Mark Wallinger's film of himself dressed as a pantomime bear really be mentioned in the same breath as Da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks? Or Michelangelo's David? Or, if you're that way inclined, Andy Warhol's soup cans?

And are Zarina Bhimji's snaps of what looks like a gap year tour of India, Zanzibar and East Africa really comparable to The Fighting Temeraire, painted by Jopseh Mallord William Turner himself and voted the Greatest Painting in Britain by listeners of Radio 4, two years ago?

And does all this fuss detract attention and funds from the type of art found in traditional museums up and down the land, such as Bournemouth's estimable Russell-Cotes Gallery?

Or could it actually be creating the art of the future?

The Victorian splendour of the Russell-Cotes on a sunny Friday morning is as far from chambers and holes and fancy-dress bears as it's possible to be. It's elegantly crammed with what most people would consider to be "proper" art: Rossetti's bored-looking Venus Verticordia, Joseph Farquharson's The Silent Evening Hour, a tranquil depiction of sheep in an autumn forest. Big paintings in gold frames, oil on canvas.

A veritable swarm of visitors are devouring the gallery's permanent collection and delighting in the touring exhibition of Lord Frederic Leighton's drawings.

Americans, some Jewish visitors and a few children are finding much to admire in the mainly Victorian exhibits. Would they come here to see the Turner Prize nominees, if the exhibition were brought down to Bournemouth? (Which it won't be.) Yes, says Eric Jackson, who comes from Massachusetts. He's interested in all art and would like to see a film of a man in a bear suit as much as he's enjoying the Leighton drawings.

Yes, too, says a lady on holiday from Cheshire, who declines to give her name.

"I would be happy to go and see the Turner Prize exhibition but I'm not saying I would understand it. I don't also think I'd like much of it but I'd give it a chance." Later she comes back again to say: "Actually I think that if Turner could see the exhibition it would probably make him turn in his grave."

What about the Leighton exhibition, then?

"It's wonderful, such skill. I'm really enjoying it," she says. The fact that the majority of visitors are gathered round a piece of modern textile art draped over one exhibit proves their open-mindedness isn't a sham.

The museum's collections and development manager, Shaun Garner, would be happy to host a touring exhibition of the Turner Prize, should it ever occur.

"It is a big thing and people do go an see it," he says. He believes that despite the jibes and the criticism, the Turner Prize is a good thing because: "Regardless of what most people think about it and say, it gets people talking about art and it gets people into the gallery and I think that when they do go to Tate Britain they'll start looking at the other art."

Supporters of the Turner Prize claim the great JM himself was regarded as scarily modern and a producer of non-art in his day, which is why it's fitting that the prize for work that is occasionally incomprehensible bears his name today.

Anyway, says lecturer in modern art, Professor Chris Wainright of London, looking at this type of art should be all about "facing the unknown".

"Most modern art says as much about the person looking at it as the artist says about it. The viewer completes the work. And I sometimes think people have to work a little bit hard to get something from it," he says.

What they'll get from the Sleeper - the name of Wallinger's bear-suit entry - is anyone's guess. But as more visits are now made to art galleries than to football matches in Britain nowadays - 42 million last year - it's a fair bet they'll get something.