Gompertz wants new artists to start "challenging preconceptions instead of reinforcing them". The first preconception to challenge is that it is art's job to challenge preconceptions. This is pure radical chic — subvert, épater le bourgeois. I prefer an art that does not bother over such temporal trivialities, an art free of all such spiteful motives. An art which endeavours instead to open out into worlds of subtle feeling, being generous and not quarrelsome. But we come to a strange point. Because what could be more radical, now, than that? What would be more radical than artists aspiring to be diligent, humble craftsmen, in order to delight their audience?

However,  it is not an idea that will gain currency any time soon. The response to my article happened to be so energetic only because I used the word ‘cool'. Many people seemed to be angry that I dared to make declarations about what is or isn't cool, and others seemed just to be excited by the prospect of a change in fashion. Evidently, ‘cool' is still extremely important. The modern art public are still a largely fashionable lot. That is why my analysis of the desperate excuses of art world insiders became muddled up with Hickey, another art world insider making desperate excuses. Hickey concludes, sadly, that the art world has grown too large and that it lacks discretion. In other words, the art world has lost its cool — cool always has to be exclusive. Here is his response to the coming catastrophe of art world de-cooling:  "Winners win, losers lose. Shoot the wounded, save yourself. Those are the rules." That is exactly what Hickey is doing: saving himself. I had written of Saatchi: "He declares himself out before the others — the only way to stay cool."

Hickey got there too, and declared himself out — almost a year later but still before most. We should be prepared for more such tirades, but we must not confuse them with a genuine reaction against the art world. These outbursts are an interesting phenomenon. But they are little more than the noise of a violent change in fashion. It is the art world crying out for a new style of presentation, but not for a new art.

The Art Newspaper recently published a story with the headline: "Brand names slip as market starts to correct". But what sort of correction? The piece reported that "artists and collectors are reacting against the carefree works that were popular during the raging noughties". Alex Rotter, the Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby's New York, explained the market's turn by saying that "we've all become more serious because of what's happened to the world, politically and economically". But if their new seriousness would be characterised by the right sort of "classic bronze" urinal breaking the million-dollar mark, then be sure that very little has changed. Nor will it change, until there are enough people working around art who are so radical that they can reject radical chic. They will have to set about distinguishing the truly good from the merely cool; that is to say, they will have to dismiss a whole century's worth of "important" iterations of a urinal.