The cold custodians of art are the last people who should ever be allowed near it

A tale of Burns and Cohen today. Robert Burns the poet, Alfred Cohen the painter. I recommend both to your attention. Burns you will know already, Alfred Cohen you may not, given that he painted sensuously, in paint rather than in epigrams, and, like many of the best artists still alive in the last quarter of the 20th century, had to take a back seat to that institutionalised facetiousness we know as conceptualism.

Born in Chicago, awakened in Paris and long resident in this country, Cohen died last year, aged 80, a lot less embittered than I would have been, or will be if I get remotely close to 80, and you can see an exhibition his work at the London Jewish Cultural Centre in NW3.

It should, of course, be Tate Modern that exhibits him, but he's a little hot for their whitened aesthetic. (If you want heat at Tate Modern you have to go to the restaurant and order up a hamburger.) And not only too hot, but too possessed of the satiric daemon. For me, although you can see the influences of Vuillard and Kokoschka and Soutine on Cohen, his best work has Daumier behind it, the vigorousness of caricature and the savage grotesqueries of the commedia dell'arte.

There's a whole room of commedia studies in NW3, wonderfully violent paintings, all dating from the Sixties, not a blanched curatorial Pierrot in sight.

I have four favourite paintings in this room. Theatre Scene 1, where ape-like figures strut in open-mouthed mockery of their own dramatic functions. Theatre Scene 2, commemorating a near-hypnotic seduction, the figures barely distinguishable from the virulent black reds of the overall composition, humans like goats, their cloven hoofs treading the antic hay. And two bearing the same title, Polichinelle Rex, one a pernickety-fingered Pulchinella, fastidious and grimacing, as though disgusted with disgust; the other all burnt and bleeding reds, the clown as solipsistic philosopher, doubled in upon himself in phallic introspection, dangerous to behold.

Pulchinella the King! And all along you thought the king was Andy Warhol, pale as death, peddling his aetiolated camperies to the detriment of almost everything that has happened in art since. But you've been misinformed. The colour of kingship is red, not white.

Which brings me to Burns, whose birthday we have all just celebrated, some of us more joyously than others. I was invited to Toast the Lassies at a Jewish Burns Night last week, and if you find it hard to get your head round that, then so did I. ("Would that be George Burns?" I enquired in my provisional letter of acceptance.) But I followed what I understood to be the tradition, raising my glass to the kosher haggis, marvelling at how well my people look in kilts, drinking whisky with exaggerated gusto and then delivering myself of an oration in keeping with the spirit of the occasion.

Not totally obscene, but certainly skirting the far shores of ribaldry, scattering my toast with readings from "Nine Inch Will Please a Lady" and "Hey Johnnie Lad, Cock up your Beaver" and other lesser-known poems of that ilk culled from the Burns canon. And only occasionally, reader, trust me, indulging my taste for a little of that light intra-gender banter which the humourless – those at whom Cohen's Pulchinella fixes his ferocious stare – call misogynistic, but which Burns himself was never able to resist.

Imagine my astonishment, then, when the resident Burnsian for the evening – a florid and for the most part entirely incomprehensible person who trundles his gutted version of Burns from one such artificial occasion to another – rose to toast the poet and in the process roasted me.

Me? What had I done? Failed of reverence, apparently. Wetted on the sacred flame. Smutted the bard. A handful of people – may they rot in hell, may they perish in the snows of Drumradnochit and never again see light dawn upon the stones of Jersualem – applauded my assailant. I knew who they were. They were the ones who follow me around, turning up at all my readings and hissing at the back. They are the masochists of the intellectual life. They exist only to be miffed.

But the resident Burnsian, whom I had never before met and never hope to meet again, was another matter. He was a fellow toaster, and at a convivial dinner – especially at a convivial dinner honouring a poetic fornicator – one fellow toaster does not diss another in the matter of the language of fornication. I had two choices: hit him now or hit him later. I decided I would hit him later, but in order to serve notice of my intention I chose the moment when his brown-nosing of the bard had reached its perigee of vile unctuousness, then stormed like a cyclone from the room. Be warned. No one accuses me of piddling on art.

I didn't punch him in the end. Too well-bred. But I did engage him in harangue. If there's one thing I hate," I said – which was already a softening of my position, since there are a thousand things I hate, and he represented at least nine hundred of them – "it's a man who offers to love art but who starts like a mouse from every instance of its vitality. Do you not recognise yourself in Holy Willie's prayer, bearing zeal when drinkers drink an' swearers swear - a thing of hypocrisy and fright?"

Then I stormed off for a second time. Pulchinella in a Pet. But Alfred Cohen would have taken my point. The cold custodians of art are the last people who should ever be allowed near it.