Petty Crimes, Contemporary Images Of Childhood Play, York City Art Gallery

YORK City Art Gallery is in the news for showing a "controversial" touring exhibition, initiated and organised by the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The words "controversial" and York City Art Gallery are not usually to be found in the same sentence, and yet just as American rap act Eminem is provoking outraged reaction on his first tour, so art which comments - as Petty Crimes most certainly does - is a necessary force.

One viewer, a female York resident, had written "child abuse" in the comments' book: kicking off a chain of reaction that yesterday saw a tabloid-style piece of sensationalist reporting on BBC Radio York and a visit by three councillors (one apparently a regular visitor, the others not so).

"Where's the stuff that's caused all the fuss," asked one York man in an anorak, at the top of the stairs, who felt he had to find out why one room of paintings, sculptures, photography and installations in the City Art Gallery had suddenly become the talking point of the day.

The "child abuse" comment, accompanied by the equally pithy "absolute rubbish - waste of space" does not name any piece in particular, but a betting man would put his money on photographs by Jo Lansley and Helen Bendon (whose video work can be seen at Impressions Gallery in York from March 10). Images of adults in "mis-worn" children's clothes outwardly take on the look of kiddie porn, but the intention is to "hijack codes of behaviour and dress and to usurp traditional female domestic roles" - and the artists do succeed in confronting "underlying desires and anxieties" of adults. Art this psychologically disturbing is rarely exhibited in York so when it is, the reaction is bound to be over the top.

Perhaps, to arrest all the hoo-ha, the viewer should have printed access to the artists' aims without the need to buy a £5 exhibition brochure.

Graham Fagen's images of childhood weapons may appal too, not in their combination of advertising styling and police-file simplicity, but in the brutality of this juvenile delinquent weaponry.

Elsewhere, Richard Woods' 18 Choppers, a cycle stack in which he has customised all manner of bikes into one brand, captures the peer pressure to have the "must-have" toy of the moment, while miniature paintings of worn and torn toys by York artist Jeremy Dickinson reflect on both adult nostalgia and childhood possession and control.

Shock for shock's sake, no less than art for art's sake, is ultimately self-destructive but debate is healthy, and Petty Crimes is an enlightened adult exhibition, serious and challenging about the subject of childhood play, in places depressing, in others humorous, in others again disturbing and provocative.

Like child's play, then.