Do children get value from galleries? Or would a DVD and an ice cream work equally well, asks Rosie Millard

Here's a quandary: to whom should great art be addressed - the experts, or hoi polloi? My niece, aged ten, recently went with her primary school on a trip to Rome (it's a rather wealthy school). Naturally, they went to the Sistine Chapel. The ceiling of the chapel is being damaged by the volume of moisture directed at it from the breath of visitors, so surely the volume of tourists who view the ceiling must be capped. And perhaps the first group to be excluded should be children - not only infants in buggies, but anyone under 16. Arguably, children can get as much value from seeing Michelangelo's masterpiece on a DVD, after which they can go and have an ice cream beside the Trevi Fountain, leaving the real thing to be savoured by art historians. It's drastic, but it could work.

However, this argument runs counter to the one that insists it is essential to allow children direct access to great works of art. This has popular currency; indeed, it is part of the rationale behind the British government's diktat of free admission to our national collections. Hypocritically I, too, subscribe to it. Last weekend Mr Millard and I took the four junior Millards to see the Ellsworth Kelly exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London. With free admission and the sun shining, we thought Kelly's bright abstracts would be a good destination for a family outing. One of our party was even an infant in a buggy.

Unfortunately, he is a rather loud and exuberant infant. The three others, one of whom was sporting an England strip, were also rather vocal. I think it was when a football was produced in the gallery that my husband and I took action, deploying mass evacuation to Kensington Gardens. We had been in the Serpentine about 13 minutes.

Ten minutes later we were all still in the gardens. The England strip was playing with his football. The infant was tottering over the grass. Suddenly, we were approached by a man, angrily hastening towards us across the sward. "You may not like what I am about to say," he began, as he puffed away on a cigarette. Mr Millard recognised him as a visitor to the gallery. "I don't think I will," he growled. A row was clearly on the cards. "Come, children," I said. "Ice cream?"

The angry man's argument went thus: "When I had young children (and not as many as you do, thank God), my wife and I took turns to look after them. We never took them into galleries. Your children were very noisy, and you did nothing to stop them. They've quite ruined my appreciation of great art."

Our response was as follows: "Children - like adults - should be able to see great works of art. We took them out of the gallery quite quickly. The exhibition is free. You are now able to revisit the venue in peace and quiet." (Plus, smoking is more antisocial than a noisy toddler, but it wasn't until 15 minutes later that I thought about saying this.)

When not with my children, I too like to have uninterrupted time with visual art. But I value taking them to galleries, and a show such as "Ellsworth Kelly" is ideal. Plus, Kelly's work is not 500 years old and about to fall off the wall thanks to moisture from visitors' respiration. Maybe what we need is a system of gallery gradation from Family Friendly to Historian Only, where you'd have to show a certificate from the Courtauld in order to gain access. But which art would go where?

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