OUR punters' jury is made up of a female barrister (43), a male doctor (42) and a retired man (62). All three have an active interest in art.

We meet in the foyer of IMMA and move first to an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Felim Egan. Egan is an abstract painter and sculptor. He often works within a narrow repertoire of forms, such as short stick shapes, circles and triangles.

After wandering for a few minutes, we all meet up in the show's final room, where Egan's large canvas Enclosure hangs. The barrister speaks up first.

"Well, I think there should be a new definition of art there is art and there is this and I don't know what this is called. I walked around and I wanted to be mesmerised. I love the mesmeric quality of art but there is none here ... it seems to me that the simpler and the duller the art, the more it seems to call for explanation."

The doctor too felt that in its austerity the work was "making an effort to be as obscure as possible". The retired man could see that some people might respond to the work, but did not yet feel any compulsion to do so himself. "This kind of stuff is all very how was it for you?" and I keep wondering `do you want me to fake it? I know what you see in something can change, but right now I see nothing."

"Felim, nul points," the barrister decides as we head off down the hall.

The next show we come upon is an exhibition of recent acquisitions, which includes work by Lee Jaffe, Maurice O'Connell and James Hanley. Jaffe's large image of a lynching, Strange Fruit, and Hanley's triptych, The Would Be's, both received highly favourable attention, for demonstrating drawing and painting abilities, as well as for offering a text that did not seem to require specialist knowledge to interpret.

Of all the works in the museum, few caused as much hostility as Maurice O'Connell's work, Never Mind "Kangaroo", Just Answer the Question, an installation featuring a number of personality assessment questionnaires pinned to the wall and a stuffed marsupial.

"The fact that the animal is not even a kangaroo, when the whole thing seems to hang on that word seems to point out the ineptness of it," the retired man felt.

A lack of "skill" was a complaint that all three made about the work, but beside noting that the pins had not even been placed straight, the barrister felt that the work was "just dated, old fashioned ... I'm not interested in what the questionnaires are supposed to establish."

"To ask questions in that manner would be incompetent," the doctor felt. "Of course it would be stupid to ask these questions of a marsupial, but to point it out is a very small joke."

The barrister felt that "if this is trying to provoke me into submission, then it hasn't succeeded. They are trying to disturb me, but I won't let them, because my purpose is unity."

Among the exhibition of the museum's photo works, the group comes to a halt in front of two of Willie Doherty's large cibachrome images of burnt out cars. "Well, you are left in a bit" of doubt what happened in each picture. One car a straight road, so it seems that it shouldn't have been part of a crash, while the other is on a bend, so maybe it has run of the road. I suppose the uncertainty is important," says the doctor. "You imagine that anyone could have taken the photographs," the retired manager observed, "but when you look closely at the colour and the composition and the light, you realise that it has all been very carefully set up."

The final show visited was a polemical exhibition about photography, in which images taken in Nicaragua are manipulated and presented in various ways. One part of the exhibition features a wall filled with questions relating to the ownership and interpretation off images, many of which could be imagined to relate to the whole, business of museums.

"They are a very politically correct set of questions," the doctor felt, "but they are also very obvious questions. I mean we know that we can't interpret without a context ... if you put somebody in charge of your museum, you get one set of facts, one type of art, whereas if you had somebody else in charge, you would get another. The idea of having a neutral museum, where you display things in warm happy, neutral respect, is impossible. If you could do it, it would be like Stockholm on a wet Sunday afternoon boring. And that's the one thing the museum shouldn't be."