ESTHETICALLY SPEAKING, I sense this curious urge to express myself. I have plenty of coffee grounds I can use, plus a stack of broken bricks and crockery and a more than adequate supply of used cat litter, and I certainly possess the prerequisite total lack of any ability - although laying hands on a naked grandmother might pose a problem.

I would say that my artistic juices are indeed at flood tide. The again, maybe it's just a particularly bothersome touch of indigestion. Whichever, modern art can have that effect on you - a sort of wrenching sensation in the heart, the soul and that tiny bit of the pancreas nearest the spleen.

This stirring in my normally moribund art genes was stimulated by the arrival on the London scene of a new museum, appropriately named the Tate Modern, and with it the realization that the stuff I've been consigning to garbage cans, landfills and charity drives is, in fact, a rich if occasionally rather ripe compost of potential wealth.

Modern art, to be sure, offers less to beauty and taste than to the beatification of the mundane, the mediocre and, if the rubbish gods have been really kind, the breathtakingly boring. From a urinal missing its plumbing to a shed that the artist had the British army blow up, the Tate Modern is full of it.

The new museum itself is a towering example of the genre, a defunct power station that looks like something Stalin's architects might have dreamed up after a really bad day down at the gulag - a stack of 4.2 million red bricks rising from the River Thames's dismal, dank south bank. Even Jack the Ripper would have given this place a miss.

They turned off the electricity here years ago, but the building itself was left standing because, as one art savant put it, it "utilized a particularly interesting art deco architectural style that was surprisingly pleasing for a power station." I knew art deco was a bit weird, but I never thought it could be downright ugly.

With the big turbines uprooted and sent off to the junkyard, or traded for an ice cream machine, or maybe turned into doorstops, the Tate folks painted the place from bottom to seven-story top in black, white and suicide gray, then threw open the doors to the truly bizarre and eccentric of the art world.

Arachnophobes will enter at their peril. In the cavernous hall lurks a humongous metallic spider, legs adangling, serving what purpose I cannot begin to imagine. Those of a sensitive disposition also might be well advised to steer clear of the six-ton plastic model of the human body with strategic bits stripped away and which its creator, Damien Hirst, has entitled "Hymn."

(It was Hirst, you may (or may not) recall, who once sliced a dead sheep down the middle, dropped it into a glass case filled with formaldehyde, called it a work of art and won prizes and all sorts of critical acclaim for it. One of his painter pals also gained a measure of renown for using elephant doo-doo to help get the shading just right.)

At the Tate Modern - or the "Cathedral of Cool," as some would have it - anything goes. Among the displays is the bit of porcelain that Marcel Duchamp offered the esthetes back in 1917. He called it "Fountain," but I've been around enough urinals to know one when I see it, even with its pipes removed.

Over in one corner is what looks like a huge stack of blackened matchsticks. It was a shed until artist Cornelia Parker persuaded the army to blow it up. Now it's a work of art entitled "An Exploded View."

But what caught my eye was something that looks like a Dagwood sandwich for overgrown termites - a huge pile with layers of timber slabs laced with cinder blocks, bricks, leather bags, plastic buckets, rolled-up rugs, crates and a barrel or two, separated by wooden palettes and looking in dire need of a good junkyard dog.

Artist Tony Craig, evidently the beneficiary of someone's extremely thorough spring housecleaning, says his intent is to "question the esthetic quality of different materials." Maybe so, but I see it as a damned good way to make a profit out of items that have become, shall we say, surplus to requirements.

I need merely to look about to espy the makings of my own artistic marvel and, by extension, a mint - a lava lamp, 13 Monopoly sets (in as many languages), a clock that operates on metal balls, metronome, cricket pads, slide projector, Brownie box camera, six generations of carpet bits, a Garfield the Cat doll, stereo speakers, seven sets of used guitar strings and an artificial wave machine.

I'm beginning to get attuned to, or in tune with, this Tate Modern thing. It seems that rubbish sells. At least some of it. I'm not sure that pictures of nude grandmothers have similar promise.

As its own contribution to modern art, the National Portrait Gallery is about to display a photograph of Germaine Greer, all 60-plus years of her, in the altogether. I haven't seen that much sagging flesh since I last dropped by the Ringling Brothers traveling emporium. This sort of thing frightens the horses.

I must compliment Ms Greer, however, on her strategic use of the right handsome ginger cat she's cuddling in her lap. Modern art could do with more cats.

Meanwhile, back at the Tate Modern, all the loony tunes weren't being played beneath the metal spider's limbs. Outside, art student Pauline Wilton-Cox had locked herself in her battered old car and said she wouldn't move until her demands for recognition were met. The recognition was for her artwork - the car, which she had covered with pieces of broken mirror.

As for the Tate Modern, a visitor may have inadvertently said it all when, upon being told that anarchists were threatening to attack the place, replied: "I hope they don't come in splashing paint all over the walls.

"It would be hard to tell what was vandalism and what was an exhibit. . . "

Thought for the Week: Remember, half the people you know are below average

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