One of John Currin’s tamer paintings featured at the Gagosian Gallery site

Often, when I look at the goings-on in the contemporary art world, I think of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. The lovable old biddy knew that people weren’t so much bad or good as (in her words), “you know, very silly.” The general public enjoys a pleasurable outrage whenever it ponders contemporary art. I take my cue from Miss Marple: Contemporary art is, as often as not, you know, very silly.

Consider the recent exhibition of paintings by John Currin, at the prestigious Larry Gagosian Gallery in uptown Manhattan. Currin, previously best known for pictures of women with absurdly large breasts, went porn-ish a few years ago. But with this exhibition, which closed at the end of January, he turned to making enlarged near-copies of images dragged off Internet porn sites. They’re painted in a lovely, deft oil-painting style reminiscent of the old masters (or — alternatively described —hard-core porn rendered in a tired academic realist manner).

Currin, of course, gives explicitness a slight twist; he elongates the necks and limbs and faces of his copulators, stretching them out as if they’re made of taffy. And he does something marshmallowy and cartoony to their faces. Were he painting flowers or landscapes, most people in the general public would probably adore his pictures — although not quite as much as they do Thomas Kinkade’s. They reek of “talent,” in the sense of the neighbor kid from your childhood who “could really draw.” But since he’s painting erection/penetration porn, only the art world goes ga-ga.

Among the cooing Currin fans are rich collectors, who snap up his pictures for sometimes more than a million dollars a pop. While a few critics have lambasted Currin for being — in formalist terms — a third-rate Andrew Wyeth or Norman Rockwell — most steer clear of discussing his subject matter. Even art writers you’d assume to be substantially feminist are porn-tolerant. (The rule seems to be, “Once [Andrea] Dworkin’d, twice shy.”) For example, the prominent art critic Jerry Saltz (now at New York Magazine) praised Currin’s previous exhibition in The Village Voice for the sheer beauty of his pictures. He also offered a very silly exegesis on why Currin’s paintings aren’t really pornographic, even though your 13-year-old son would probably try to steal your copy of the catalog and stash it ‘neath his mattress.

Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” pronouncement on pornography has come to be considered equally very silly. Everyone acknowledges that in art, context is everything. Hang a porno Currin in a trendoid Tribeca loft (um, preferably without children residing in it) and you have very hip art; hang it in the dimly lit Baby Doll Lounge and you have tacky porn decor; hang it in the lobby of a skyscraper, and you’ll have the police barging through the doors.

But for anyone who writes about contemporary art, it’s never worth the toll to go down the road of condemning porn-based art. The charge of prudery awaits you if you do. Besides, when it comes to the art world, everybody’s already seen things much, much worse than Currin’s paintings. Try Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio of photographs (the famous anally-inserted bullwhip) for starters. And don’t forget the “paintings” (actually ink-jet photo repros on canvas) of Jeff Koons and his porn-star wife La Cicciolina doing the horizontal bop, or Courbet’s gynecologist’s-eye-view in The Origin of the World (1866), or, while you’re at it, some of those ancient Greek vases in the Metropolitan Museum’s elegant galleries. For unflappably sophisticated art-world insiders, Currin’s paintings reside well within the borders of fine modern art.

The truly very silly part of Currin is not his artistic bent, but rather his foolish political mind. In a Calvin Tomkins profile in the January 28th issue of The New Yorker, Currin states that his reasons for making paintings of pornographic images are 1) his outrage over the “censorship of the Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad”; 2) “also the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam”; 3) “the larger struggle” — i.e., “If all your freedoms are taken away, even sleazy porn becomes valuable”; 4) September 11th, and his life before that, “and also a picture of a sunset, this failing light of liberty.”

Wow! Who’d have guessed it? By standing tall for porn, Currin is actually a front-liner in the war against terror. It’s the kind of thing that Esquire magazine, in its old “Dubious Achievements” issue, would have captioned, “The Thanks of a Grateful Nation.”

As Miss Marple knew full well, people such as Currin aren’t so much bad (the evil pornographer) or good (the principled contemporary artist) as they are, “you know, very silly.”