Bjarne Melgaard's black woman in the shape of a chair – as seen in the now-notorious photoshoot of Roman Abramovich's girlfriend Dasha Zhukova – has been totally misunderstood

The contemporary art world likes to think it has a common touch. While classical music is for the elite and the literary novel a minority taste, the art of today speaks the demotic and gets its message heard, from Jeff Koons to Grayson Perry, from Damien Hirst to Bjarne Melgaard.

Bjarne who?

I mean the Norwegian-born, New York-based artist who has just blundered, or been led by a blundering fan, into the baleful glare of the outraged internet.

Melgaard is the creator of a chair on which Russian art promoter Dasha Zhukova has been photographed, to international horror. The chair is shaped like a woman tied up, lying on her back with her boots as a backrest. Oh, and she's black.

Cue accusations of racism, attempts to apologise/explain and articles about the whole sorry saga. But in reality, it is not about racism as such. It is about the clumsy exposure of a strange work of art to popular culture in a way that begs to be misunderstood.

The New York Times has described Melgaard as a "projectile vomiter" of an artist. Excess is his thing. One of his other sculptures shows the Pink Panther smoking crystal meth.

His art may be in bad taste, but I am fairly sure that in making this chair he was not intending to denigrate black women. Rather it is a comment on the controversial works of the 1960s British artist Allen Jones.

Allen Jones, Chair 1969. © Allen Jones

It's a pastiche of the pop art sculptures Jones made in the late 60s, which use women – literally – as furniture. Jones's art reflects the attitudes of its time. Its hyperbolic sci-fi look inspired the furniture of the Korova Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange.

Today it is an accepted part of modern art history and in fact Jones has had a revival lately.

So what was Melgaard's point? Surely, in making this woman black he means to retoxify the art of Allen Jones, to offend people with an image long since accepted. The intention is therefore the opposite of racist: it is to question power and representation. Are you offended by this black woman's abuse? Then why is it OK for white women to be similarly humiliated in a respected pop art icon in the Tate collection?

Offensiveness in art is often a way to satirise injustice. But this provocative sculpture has been naively injected into a popular culture whose default mode, in the Twitter age, is to catch out celebrities and call them names – racist!

There's a lot of idiocy in this tale, but none of it necessarily comes from the work of art now crassly labelled a "racist chair".