“Dying is an art,” wrote Sylvia Plath. It is an art she claimed to do “exceptionally well”. Whether her son, Nick Hughes’s recent death by suicide was art or not, we shall never know… it wasn’t a public affair.

Jade Goody’s death, on the other hand, was a public affair. As loathed as I am to write of it, I can’t help wishing that the role of these two deaths were swapped.

Hughes, with his fascinating genealogy, his wonderful mind (a highly respected biologist) and a well recorded paternal devotion (to Ted Hughes) – the ending of which upon his father’s death in 1998 may have been a leading factor in his suicide – is a far more fascinating subject for art than the gormless and one-dimensional Goody.

Just imagine what Hughes might have said in the months leading up to his death had he “Goodyised” it and transformed his death into his life’s greatest achievement. Imagine the commentary on living with the stigma of being Plath’s son and the kudos of being Hughes’s. His own thoughts on the couple’s turbulent marriage: her mental breakdown and his alleged abuse. It must have been hard for Hughes to live in the very oppressive shadow of one of the world’s most famous suicides. Maybe Hughes would, like his mother, make sure dying would “feel like hell… would feel real”.

Instead, we got Goody, who wanted to be known as, “one who irritated and entertained people in equal measure”. She died having achieved at least half her wish.

The public interest with Goody is not due to media saturation. Media saturation of her death is due to public interest. Serious journalism has long been bemoaning the celebrification of news without considering the wishes of society. It is a complex phenomenon. Do people really want newspapers dumbed down to celebrity gossip (and sales figures clearly support this – The Sun is the UK’s biggest seller) or is the dumbing-down of media creating a society that wants more gossip?

Even the media attention afforded to Hughes was largely gossip. His suicide was covered because of who his parents were, and, more importantly, because he followed his mother in his choice to decide when he exited the world – “is there a suicide gene?”  papers were asking.

The media’s role as an agenda setter has changed over the years as media owners increasingly see their role as purely corporate. Social responsibility has been replaced by profitability and the media’s primary function is to make money. The role of newspapers is now less about informing and educating and is more about entertaining.

It is easy to dislike Goody, whose intolerance was matched only by her ignorance – she thought Sherlock Holmes “made toilets”, asked, “who’s Heinstein (Einstein)?” and once said: “Do they speak Portuganese in Portugal? I thought Portugal was in Spain.” Yet, it is difficult for anyone to criticize the manner in which she controlled the media around her death. Her motive may very well have been to make money for her children she left behind, or it may have been less altruistic as she hung on so desperately to the fame she needed for fulfilment. Either way, she was in control.

The interest here, however, is not with Goody at all, but rather whether she managed to turn her death into art. Do images of her thinning hair and her fading body, of her wedding and hospital visits, and of her last gasps, have artistic value?  Does Goody’s story, packaged in episodic bites, framed and ready for consumption, artistically tell a story that appealed to our senses and emotions?

It is an interesting question, the positive answering of which would make Goody an artist and her medium, the media. And looking at Tolstoy’s What is Art?, it seems that Tolstoy might just have approved. Goody clearly created an emotional link between artist and audience, one that “infected” the viewer. She “united people via communication with the crucial values of clearness and genuineness”. She even met Tolstoy’s most important criterion that the concept art “embraces any human activity in which one emitter, by means of external signs, transmits previously experienced feelings.”

Tolstoy might have even gone further and recognised it as good art. Tolstoy believed that “the stronger the infection, the better is the art”, and with Goody, infection was tremendous. Good art, claims Tolstoy, fosters feelings of universal brotherhood. Bad art inhibits such feelings. Goody’s death could even be seen as “lower-class” art and one with a Christian message – two important considerations for Tolstoy.

Of course, Tolstoy is not the only source we should approach when trying to define or criticize art and whether we see the “mediafication” of Goody’s death as art is certainly going to have varying opinions. Whether she has started a new art movement, we shall soon see. More likely, she may have pushed society’s morbid fascination with death higher up the media agenda.

Death is the ultimate reality show subject. Who knows, maybe we are not far from seeing a new version of Big Brother – Terminally Ill Big Brother, where contestants have only weeks to live and viewers vote for whom they believe will survive the longest.

Now, if those contestants were great thinkers, artists, poets, writers and scientist (such as Hughes), we might all just be compelled to watch.

• For an excellent Hughes obituary, visit http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5992445.ece