Arthur Smith - The world of fine Arth

11:30am Impressionism and Scotland, National Gallery Complex

WE'RE looking at a drizzly Pissarro painting of a bridge in the rain when Arthur Smith has an idea. "Watch this. Let's see what happens if I start laughing." He starts slowly with a rumbling chuckle then works up into a great big belly laugh, rolling about on his heels and clutching his straw hat to his head. Nothing happens.

Arthur Smith, Fringe comedian, revolutionary philosopher and grumpy old man is now the head of a new movement: Arturart – A Counter Insurgency Movement Against the Repression of Laughter in Art Galleries. Rather than try to get his works accepted by the establishment, Arthur Smith has cut out the middle man and set up his own gallery in Queen Street – but more of this later. In the meantime, our mission is to tour the finest artistic establishments in Edinburgh, gathering information and ruminating on art, life and comedy.

Almost as soon as we step inside the National Galleries, Smith is drawn to Pas Mèche by Jules Bastien-Lepage. "I come and see this picture every time I come to Edinburgh. He's a little lad with a little bit of trouble about him but a lot of life and vitality. He reminds me of myself growing up in Bermondsey – although I wasn't quite as raggedy as that.

"I've been looking at him now for 20 years."

Smith first came to Edinburgh to visit his brother at university here, then came as a comedian in the early 1980s. At that time there were only a handful of comics, no awards, no big business. It was a DIY festival – and that was the way he liked it. "The Fringe was an organic thing. It started by itself and it's always had its own life. There were no stand-ups here until 1982 – I think people forget that."

In the 1990s Smith was a notorious hell-raiser, who was arrested almost every year on his magical tours of the Royal Mile. Now as a television star and celebrity, he has minions to be arrested on his behalf. And he has been teetotal since a near fatal bout of pancreatitis in 2002.

After years of being an operatic drunk, Smith found it amazingly easy to give up. "I occasionally swill a bit of red wine around my mouth if I have a steak. But really I don't miss it." We pause and take a look at the sad couple of soaks in Degas' L'Absinthe. "You somehow sense that picture is early in the day. It has a wonderful sense of sodden hopelessness. You wouldn't use it as an advert for alcohol. "

12:30pm Tracey Emin: 20 Years, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

A couple of Edinburgh ladies are huddled around one of Tracey Emin's graphic hand-written accounts of gynaecological trauma. "Ooh, that is just degrading," says one. "It's dreadful," says the other.

"Can I ask you why you're reading it?" says Arthur Smith, who is eavesdropping on their conversation.

We establish the Edinburgh ladies have come to the exhibition in the spirit of enquiry – but have not found Ms Emin much to their taste. "You came though. Good on you," says Smith – and, pointing towards Emin's famous unmade bed (sold for £150,000 in 2006) whispers: "I bet you just want to get in there and make that bed now don't you." This little encounter pleases him enormously. "I always think the most amazing thing about the Fringe is the people of Edinburgh. You go to some awful thing at a village hall in some far away place and there are the people of Edinburgh having a look." But he's less impressed by Emin. "It's all degradation," he says. "There's something quite teenage about it. It's hard going, because it's all about her – and in the end you should try and find something to say about something other than yourself."

Looking at one of Emin's giant tapestries of despair, he suddenly comes up with a suggestion. "She should find a football team to support," he says. "Or at least she should put her bank statement on the wall."

1:30pm Foto, Dean Gallery

"I like it. You get the feeling that photography was still quite new and they were experimenting – trying to work out what you could do with it," says Smith. We discuss how pictures taken between the wars are strange looked at in retrospect – knowing what the farm workers, bank managers, coal miners and peasants in the pictures were about to walk into.

"You poor, poor bastards," says Arthur. Then, jabbing the pictures with his finger: "Dead, dead, dead."

2:25pm Vanity Fair Portraits, Scottish National Portrait Gallery

The idea was to take a picture of Arthur Smith with Margaret Thatcher glaring enormously from the wall. There are copyright issues and we are not allowed, but Smith snarls instinctively at the woman who was the bête noir of 1980s comics. He is often consulted these days as some kind of elder statesman for alternative comedy, but says that, like punk rock, it was over almost as soon it began.

"Nobody really knows what it was but it wasn't much more than 'not talking about "niggers" and "Pakis"'. The counter movement lasted longer than the thing itself."

In some ways the backlash is still going on – with some younger comedians courting controversy by lashing out against liberal attitudes. Smith isn't impressed: "You can't say, 'It's just a joke.' Jokes carry culture – they are not just about changes of language, they mean something."

And he is underwhelmed by the shiny showbiz world of Vanity Fair. But he pauses next to a photograph of Arthur Miller and Inge Morath. "I had lunch with them there. By that lake, at about that time," he says. "I was very hungover and I didn't know what to say to him. But he was a nice man, he drove me to the station."

3:45pm Arturart at 15 Queen Street

After a thoroughly enjoyable day we arrive at our destination: The Institute of Arturart, housed in a four-storey Georgian house in the New Town. Last year the exhibition won the If.Comedy panel award – which Smith, immune to awards, is offering for sale by the pound.

The gallery is very much like Arthur Smith himself: anarchic, funny and slightly shambolic with a strong sense of humanity at its core. "The thing about art is that no one really knows what they are talking about," he says. "I suppose in a way I'm saying everyone can do art."

There's a room full of paintings by Simon Munnery, a live bed show featuring two actors in their underwear living in a wonky Wendy house and a cupboard full of strangely positioned Winnie the Pooh dolls – the subversion of Disney.

I particularly love the signs on the stairs with slogans such as "Even Gloria Gaynor will not survive" and "William Burdett Coots has Man Boobs". "You've spelt his name wrong," I tell him. "Well at least he can't sue," he says. The laughter is part of the point. "I'm trying to say that art is too self-important. It could do with a bit of an injection of the rambunctuous comic element. I want people to come in and laugh and to come out with a slightly altered perception."

At the top of the house, in a room where choral music plays, a procession of flying Barbies escape into the sky.

"They are all angels." he says. "They are all trying to break free." The neighbours opposite were kind enough to let him knock in a nail – but he agreed in turn to take down the enormous rubber baby he originally planned to be scaling the back of the house.

Just as Smith turns the whole of the High Street into a Fringe venue in his secret midnight tours, he is on a mission to liberate art and to transform the world into a gallery. Looking out over Queen Street, he says he would like to have had secreted exhibits up the trees, to have altered the street signs or to have a person with a mirror giving secret signals from Corstorphine Hill.

But he seems most proud of his health and safety exhibit, a series of nonsensical warning notices around a paddling pool full of loose wires. Apparently the health and safety man from the council thought it was so funny he rang all his friends to come and tell them to see it. "I love the idea of all these health and safety men turning up."

• Arthur Smith's Institute of Arturart is at 15 Queen Street (Venue 354), and is open 2pm until 5:30pm daily. Arthur Smith's Public Lecture – The Toilet Role of Arturart in the History of Western Representation, is at the Assembly Rooms, 16 August, at 6pm.