It was a fleet of weird clouds over Liverpool city centre, seen in the evening light from the steps of Lime Street Station, that snapped me out of my kitsch-induced daze. These were immense, compressed, UFO-like things, sinister grey against the blue of the sky, with their ends faintly smudged and torn so that you couldn't quite focus on them properly. They were magnificent, and they reminded me that sights can be both beautiful and moving (those archaic concepts), because after two hours in the Walker Art Gallery, I wasn't sure whether I'd merely seen a bunch of bad art or whether I'd lost my aesthetic sense altogether. Selected this year by the artists Fiona Rae and Jenny Saville and the critic Matthew Collings (the competition takes place every two years as part of the Liverpool Biennial), the "John Moores 22" exhibition of contemporary painting should, in theory, present the brightest talents working with brush and canvas today. The competition is entirely open, the only requirement for entry being some slides of your work. And yet the painting on display is so hackneyed and unimaginative, the general level of execution so slapdash and so gauche, that, frankly, it's more interesting outside.
Most of the 38 pictures in the exhibition "longlist", chosen from a total of more than 5,000 submissions, fall into five basic categories. First, and most flamboyantly, you have the Pollock pastiche, the work that takes the paradigm of modern painting and turns it into something arch or pretty or glazed with sci-fi slickness. Closely related to these, in that it seems to want both to adopt and to infantilise the language of Abstract Expressionism, is Jane Millican's Untitled (green), a smeared expanse of luminous greens within which a frenzy of coloured blobs and scrawls run riot. The effect is like a kind of cartoon Twombly, the fairies at the bottom of the garden rendered in all their inhuman oddness. The next category is that perennial of British art, the trowel-it-all-on-and-hope-for-the-best school of abstraction. Pictures by Gary Wragg and Alan Gouk have a childlike crudeness that would have seemed wild 50 years ago but which now looks mannered and academic, the safest of all possible options for anyone who wants to appear "arty".
Slightly more up-to-date in their knowing way with blandness, the artists who have learnt from Gary Hume make big, dumb, baby-faced abstracts that owe as much to Rainbow and Teletubbies as they do to Mondrian and Malevich. Most prominent of these is John McLean, whose picture Estate consists of empty, Pentel-hued circles floating against a background of thinly painted black. It acts as a kind of excitement vacuum, but maybe that's the point. Then there are the smaller, neater, more obviously decorative abstractions that would go perfectly with the designer sofa and rush matting - the kind of thing you see lots of at the Affordable Art Fair, that Ikea of the art world. Finally, and slightly more engaging, you have the Paul Klee-esque whimsy, such as Rachael Miles's eye-studded hive (Electron) or Gerard Hemsworth's picture of Ganesh reeling among rotund bushes (Sidewinder). Conspicuous by its absence is any amount of land- scape painting, although Richard Kidd's Talisker Bay, a messy elemental scene bisected by a line of spectral trees, is one of the show's better pictures.
One positive thing that can be said for the selection is its bias towards those making physical, so-called "painterly", pictures, works that, in Collings's own words, are "particularly about painting" and that "couldn't have been done in some other medium". But then none of them, apart from the aforementioned Alan Gouk, makes it on to the final shortlist. Paul Morrison's black-and-white, bubble-like, Hanna Barbera-style landscapes are wonderful, but in both look and execution (he projects digitally manipulated images on to canvas and then paints over them), they could hardly be less painterly. They let cartoons into the sphere of "fine art" but end up highlighting the imaginative richness of that greatest of 20th-century art forms. Martin Maloney's Bloomsbury Square WC1, another of his cruddily realistic figure paintings, is actually a collage made from slivers of plastic, while BANK's The Ambassador, though an impressively scabrous piece of art- terrorism, is hardly about painting or its possibilities (not to mention the fact that to commend it in a painting competition is to miss the point entirely).
As for Peter Davies's prizewinning Super Star Fucker, a vaguely tongue-in-cheek diagram listing all the trivial things you think of when someone mentions Warhol, well, the mind boggles. This makes Warhol himself look deep. In spite of all the worthy talk about painterliness, the message is clear - it's not the painters but the smart-arses who get the gongs.
"John Moores 22" is at the Walker Art Gallery (0151 478 4199) until 8 December
