The Celtic Alternative.(art exhibitions in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin)

In any major city these days, you can encounter more neoconceptual artists--and their deceptively artless videos and installations-with- attitude--than you can shake a mahlstick at. What Europe offers is the same hyperhip contemporanea plus stacks and stacks of traditional great art to go along with it. Every two years, the Venice Biennale welcomes practically the whole contemporary-art world to share its precious space with palacefuls of Tiepolos and Bellinis. And every two years, thousands of art lovers descend on Venice to enjoy this cultural one- stop shopping. But as we see it, there's really no need to traipse all the way to the Biennale. (It'll be up all the way through Nov. 15, so you can make it an autumn destination.) This summer we're patching together our own sweet-and-spicy art menu by prowling some grittier-- but quite art-nourishing--cities to the north: Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin. Call it the Celtic Option.

Edinburgh is a beautiful town; the city center curls up against an elegant stone fortress that rises high above an ultramarine sea. At first glance, it doesn't seem like the kind of place where old masters and tres cutting-edge art would be exhibited cheek by jowl. But refreshingly, that's exactly the case. Scotland's National Gallery is conveniently tucked right at the bottom of the castle hill. (Watch out for construction detours--there's a sort of Louv-rification of the grounds going on.) Inside, you'll find the best mix of trove (Poussins! Raeburns! Rembrandts!) and ambience on either side of the channel. In fact, on the evening we ventured in to catch the newly bought Titian "Venus Rising From the Sea," not only was the museum offering live guitar music and a gratis glass of the grape, but folks were allowed to wander, sipping, among the old masters as if they owned the things.

Back up the hill near the train station sits the Fruitmarket Gallery, a not-for-profit venue specializing in the very, very new. Its current offering (through July 19) is a pair of solo shows by film and video artists Michelle Naismith and Rosalind Nashashibi. The winner of this year's Beck's Futures Prize (think Turner Prize for rookies), Nashashibi is earnestly, almost numbingly deadpan in her films about model-airplane buffs in Nebraska and British women in a thrift shop. The Glasgow-born Naismith is the intellectual comedian, putting forth mock-documentary evidence about one "Moodle Pozart" (yep, it's a dog in the guise of an 18th-century composer).

If sitting in austere, darkened cubes watching twee videos isn't your cuppa, the --Royal Botanic Garden contains a lovely, open and bright contemporary-art exhi-bition space called Inverleith House. In it, Simon Periton shows giant, multilayered, colored paper cutouts--avant- gardedoilies, if you will--of leaves and trees that nicely (if somewhat glibly) announce their presence on the wall. Upstairs, humor returns, with Gary Rough's show, called "Mantel-piece," which includes a TV set permanently displaying the word intermission while the theme from "Lawrence of Arabia" drones from the speakers. Some press material describes the show as being about "the polarities of self and other." We prefer to regard it as harmlessly frivolous. (Both shows are up through July 27.)

Whatever your reaction, do stay to tour the world-class gardens themselves. And since the whole ...