Ghent's Museum of Contemporary Art lives up to its billing

Billed as the most exciting cultural event in Flanders this year, the opening of Ghent's fine new Museum of Contemporary Art, Smak, does not disappoint.

Both the collection and its new home in a converted casino are a marvellous tribute to their curator, director and inspiration, the controversial Jan Hoet, who built a renowned collection for the city and has fought for decades for a permanent premises.

Established in 1975, the museum has until now had to share the cramped space of its neighbour, the Museum of Fine Arts. Now, for the first time, it can show off its eclectic collection.

The casino has been transformed into a dramatic series of simple white galleries of varying sizes, flooded with natural light where possible. There is room in the 4,000 square metres to show both the intimate and the grand - the museum even opens out at the back to a high-vaulted hall where an overflow can be accommodated.

"I am incredibly proud of the new museum in Ghent - and, in the first place, of its architecture," Hoet writes in an introduction to Smak. "I do not want art to fit architecture, but architecture to fit art . . ."

With his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Frank Gehry has put his sponsor in seventh heaven, while in Ghent the architect Koehn van Niewenhuyse has put art in seventh heaven.

"And on the roof of this former dream factory a man is measuring the clouds," he says. "I could not describe the future of our museum, the future of mankind better than this sculpture by Jan Fabre: even when we have achieved something, our spirit must continue to dare measure the unreachable over and over again."

Van Niewenhuyse acknowledges their common purpose: "A museum should set off the works to their best advantage and not pretend to be some kind of massive sculpture."

Hoet has radical views on the role of the museum, rejecting the idea of major retrospectives in favour of exhibitions which look forward. His relationship with artists is different, too, insisting that the artist must place his own work in a room of his choice and not be placed by the museum. In 1986, he broke new ground with the Chambre d'Amis exhibition which spread the work of 51 artists around private homes in Ghent.

The collection does not pretend to be comprehensive, but its range of international and Belgian artists is remarkable. Post-war art of the Cobra (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam) movement is well represented by Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, and Asger Jorn. The main elements of Pop Art are here including David Hockney and Andy Warhol, minimalism, conceptual art and the Arte Povera movement.

The museum has important contributions from Panamarenko, including a splendid "lifesize" tin flying saucer, from the quiet, ironic graphic humour of Belgian Marcel Broodthaers, Francis Bacon and Joseph Beuys. The latter's major installation, Wirtschaftswerte, contrasts uncomfortably steel shelves of grotty consumer goods from former East Germany with its setting in a room whose bourgeois conventionality is reflected in a series of 19th century classical portraits.

David Hammon's Chasing the Blue Train takes up most of a large gallery - a toy train track meanders through a room dotted with a series of upturned grand pianos and piles of coal - a commentary on the contrast between the reality of black workers' lives in the US in the 1930s, searching for work from coalfield to coalfield, and the jazz-loving, smiling stereo type.

And while Hoet sees Beuys as the key figure of the 1980s, this decade, he says, is best represented by the Russian Illya Kabakov. His The Toilet (1992) also pulls no punches about the realities of life in the East.

The visitor steps gingerly across rickety duckboards into the women's entrance of the grimy concrete public toilet to find himself in a crowded shabby living-room surrounded by the debris of everyday living.

Politics is here all around: Hans Haacke's ironic agit-prop ad for a Belgian arms manufacturer, "the world leader in small arms manufacture", uses photos of their effects in South Africa to make his point and is artistic polemic at its best. And the politics of the art world, as in Broodthaers's Museum, a picture of a series of identical gold bars, each labelled with the name of a great artist.

Hoet insists that art must disturb, not just politically but in finding new ways of seeing. "The artist occupied with his own existence, who roots and ploughs in his own lot, may well be excellent. But it is a much more interesting artist who summons up questions in me or you or suggests solutions regarding our solidarity in the face of destiny . . . At the end of a century of extreme cruelty and brilliant technical ingenuity, it is the artist who absorbs the uncertainty, the hope, the scream of the world and formulates suggestions for it."