Art - Miranda Sawyer on why we are all shopping for our lives

The exhibition "Shopping: a century of art and consumer culture" at Tate Liverpool is a giant. Spread over two floors and 17 rooms, it features bracing work by Duchamp, Christo, Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Andreas Gursky, Michael Landy, Damien Hirst, Wolfgang Tillmans and Andy Warhol, who once said, "All department stores will become museums and all museums will become department stores." This exhibition goes further, with an opening installation by Guillaume Bijl that reproduces Tesco's in perfect form: fully stocked, fresh products lined up and ready to go, but with no till assistants, no way to buy. It's a disconcerting experience, walking through a gallery door to find yourself in a mini-mart. "One bloke got very annoyed because he couldn't buy the cans of Theakston's Old Peculiar," confesses a guide. "They'd sold out of it in all the shops round his [area]."

After this bang-up-to-the-minute work, the show follows a rough chronological order from the turn of the 20th century. Straight photographs of small specialist shops in France, America and Liverpool, lead on to the surrealists, who were obsessed with both reflections and mannequins, and thus, naturally, with shop windows. Man Ray thought that mannequins should be released to roam the streets, and there are some of his funny, spooky shots of store models dressed by surrealist friends. Politics come out to play around the Twenties and Thirties, too: Hannes Meyer, Marxist and architect, believed that standard consumer items were an expression of democratic collective culture, and so displayed them as though on a conveyor belt, marching from the production line; Frederick Kiesler applied painterly principles to shop windows, forcing a stronger connection between ordinary life and high art. Their work is as cool and modern as a freshly minted Prada store.

It is splashy pop art that really wakes "Shopping" up, though. A re-creation of the 1964 "American Supermarket" exhibition, which mixed real foods with Warhol's soup cans and Robert Watts's jokey pink apples, presents commodities as art and art as commodities. The smaller-scale reproduction of Claes Oldenburg's The Store (1961), where he set up shop and sold melty sculptures in the shape of clothes, food, stationery, is next to the artist's mission statement: "I am for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum . . . that embroils itself with everyday crap and still comes out on top." The collective energy and wit of the pop art scene-stealers leave the subsequent, more contemporary works cold; although Hirst's deathly Pharmacy and Gursky's linear 99 Cent store scene come out on top, and Fluxus, the Sixties and Seventies anti-consumerism movement, anticipates Michael Landy (sadly, we just get his modest Costermongers' Stall and Closing Down Sale, rather than an installation dazzler).

Despite pop art's efforts, the best thing in the exhibition is Ben Vautier's Bizarre Bazaar 2002, which whirrs and buzzes and tweets and chatters, festooned in slogans, toys, knick-knacks, moving parts. It tempts us into its fortune-teller interior and reminds us that shopping is not just a western experience, or an apolitical one, or a cool, clean, slickly packaged affair; and that art about shopping isn't only an appreciation of patterning and plate glass, jokes about Fendi or fast food, an ironic wink at the joy of shoes. There were more people poking round the engaging, entertaining Bizarre Bazaar than any other exhibit, and that was with the bubble machine switched off.

Still, shopping, other than for essentials, is entertainment these days, a bit of fun. And having helped out for a term at Central St Martin's College of Art, I can confirm that the next generation of artists are as obsessed with shopping as their 20th-century predecessors, both as leisure activity and as subject - global consumerism versus individual identity is a favourite argument. But can shopping itself be art? There are plenty who might agree - Trinny and Whinny, the Sex and the City stylist, anyone who considers high and low culture to be of equal merit. Yet it's far more interesting to look at the question in reverse. To see art as shopping explains the unease that many have with modern work.

Shopping is a fundamental part of contemporary culture. It keeps the economic world spinning. As Boris Groys points out in his excellent catalogue essay, modern western governments beg the public to buy more in times of crisis. The first thing Bush did after 9/11 was urge his country back into the stores. Shop or the economy will fail. Despite this dependency, we still secretly judge ourselves in terms of production: what can we make that is of benefit to the world? We apply this old-fashioned principle more strictly to those whom we see as having a higher calling. An artist must create something wonderful that we couldn't produce ourselves.

In these postmodern times, all an artist can do is observe, criticise, recontextualise what has gone before or what is out there already. Buy it up and put it somewhere weird. In a word, consume. As Groys has it: "Every artist is primarily a user, a consumer of the medium in which he works." Duchamp and Warhol left a legacy: contemporary artists see themselves not as primary producers but as really smart consumers, consumers who see through the glitter and artifice to reveal the true message beneath. They show us how to do it. Sometimes, they dispense with the art altogether, and just offer themselves up for public consumption. Not innocently, though, as a carpenter might offer up a nicely turned table leg: these expert consumers ensure that we consume them in exactly the way they want.

The traditionalist public wants artists to produce; the modern artist wants to consume. So John Humphrys, Kim Howells and Brian Sewell bang on about price and whether a piece is art or not because they're still stuck in the age of the artisan. They want a crafted, one-off product to buy. Frankly, they're as relevant as raffia-weaving. Anyone born in the late 20th century has learnt that it's about consumption not production, and artists, like everybody else, are shopping for their lives.

"Shopping: a century of art and consumer culture" is at Tate Liverpool, L3 (0151 702 7400) until 23 March

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