Programmes on art are richly available at present (at least on the BBC), and have produced two kinds of infuriation. The School of Saatchi (BBC2 Mondays) prompted thousands of young artists to show their work to Charles Saatchi, competing for an approval that will mean one of them having work included in a show that the “reclusive collector” is mounting next year in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

Saatchi patronage is potentissimo: through him, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and others have risen to great wealth and celebrity. The show is the artists’ equivalent of The Apprentice: Emin, one of a four-person jury who weeded out the hopefuls for Saatchi, did an Alan Sugar number, saying stuff like: “I’ve never seen such f***ing rubbish in all my life!” She’s a rebarbative figure, but I was usually with her on that.

But it was infuriating – both in the nature of the programme and the inarticulacy of the artists. Here were what would – presumably – be the cream of Britain’s artists for the next half-century, scrambling desperately, sweatily, for favour from a man who nodded at one and frowned at another through the medium of an aide, Rebecca Wilson, who conveyed his thoughts: “Charles is really excited by...” or “Charles thought it didn’t really work...”

Here was the Lord High Executioner of art, his curtained-off choice granting elevation or confirming obscurity, a ceremony of propitiation of the Great Saatchi’s taste (“Charles likes bold statements...”).

And the artists! Few could give a reason for working, or an explanation of what they were doing – and the material was usually so obscure that it rarely spoke for itself. One of them, chosen to be on a shortlist of six, had screwed a small towel rail on a board and hung a whistle on a string from it: she “liked things hanging”.

Another did a video of birds in flight, which was beautiful – in the way an Attenborough documentary would be, neither better nor worse, but “framed” differently. Khana Evans, not chosen, who got the “f**king rubbish” blast from Emin for a conventional portrait, came back spunkily by saying she thought what Emin did was “shite”, and that she, Evans, stood “for good British art” (rather than “Britart”?).

Once the six had been chosen in the first programme, last week’s showed them in Hastings, tasked with making public art. One effort (the winner, and the one least admired by the public) was a mock rock placed in a pool on which kids played in pedalos shaped as swans: for a minute, I thought the swans were the art. And why not? Why was the rock better? After all, “if the audience thinks it’s art, it’s art”, as one artist said. Another, asked why his work was art, snapped: “why isn’t it?”

The antidote to this was Roger Scruton, whose Why Beauty Matters (Saturday BBC2) had the philosopher photographed with Michelangelo’s David and Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Theresa – and with Marcel Duchamp’s “R. Mutt” urinal, and a piece called “a can of shit”, well described. Great art, he said, had now ceased to exist: there are either no rules for it, or – especially in the case of architecture – it is judged by its utility, an attitude that produced 1960s and 70s housing estates. Scruton was duly shown in dank, graffiti’d underpasses, then striding past a row of elegant Georgian houses.

And here was another infuriation. Scruton’s universe was wholly abstract: in it, by implication, the Georgian house folk and the estate-ists were equally able to choose where they lived. Why didn’t the sillies all live Georgian? Why did the architects build high-density estates? Maybe because they were better than slums? My taste is Scruton’s, but not my common sense.

The Polish poet Cseslaw Milosz once said that “everyone going his own way, according to his own truth ... leads to a disintegration of the moral order”. You felt the force of that blowing about you as you saw Saatchi’s shortlisted six attempt to attract the attention of the people of Hastings, or as you grasped the severe intellectual and artistic limits of the excremental tin. Art is what I feel: who says it isn’t? Scruton, silly as he could be, at least struggled against the sleep of reason that seemed to befog the young hopefuls.

Another Pole (this one a BritPole), the critic Waldemar Januszcak, sought to find a bridge over the Saatchi-Scruton chasm (Ugly Beauty, BBC2, Sunday November 21). Padding bulkily about Venice, he connected Turner to James Tyrell, Rembrandt to Damien Hirst, Tiepolo to Yoko Ono – and made you believe it, because he and they (the live ones) did.

And in Own Art (in the Imagine series, BBC1, Tuesday) Alan Yentob charted a movement that advances up to £2,000 to those who wish to buy or commission work from living artists both famed and obscure. One man, a lawyer, asked the painter Chris Gollon to do a work with the theme of “Justice”. Only a little dazed, Gollon said: “I’ll give it a go.”

The quality that art brings out, says Milosz, is “mindfulness”, which “occurs at the moment when time stops”. Art can make it seem to stop. For all that Scruton seemed anxious to tell us that mindfulness was no longer possible, there was too much evidence, even after Duchamp’s urinal had said the last word on fashioned beauty, that it still seeks something to be mindful of. And the vigour of these programmes, and even of the artists, gave you hope.