Hickey laments that in London everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst.  "I'm just not interested in him. Never have been. But I'm interested in Gary Hume and [sic] written about him quite a few times." Hume over Hirst — the intellectual's choice. To the art world outsider, of course, this is simply preferring one shade of shallowness to another, and probably only because this new shade is very slightly less ubiquitous.

To find that the vision of a Thornton or a Hickey cannot extend beyond the art world's most inner walls is to understand that their like would simply not be capable of participating in any meaningful attack on the art world's outer fortifications — they are not reacting against the corruption of the art world, they are just quibbling over their place in it.

Thornton's last reason for not writing on the art market: "The pay is appalling. If you understand the art market well enough to write about it with any degree of intelligence, then you know more than most of the art advisors out there." True, but it is still an envious snipe at the new breed of art world insiders who have quickly become more important than the critics. And a hurt Hickey said:  "Art editors and critics — people like me — have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It's not worth my time." Snobbery is poking through the bitterness. Critics were supposed to justify modern artworks with pseudo-academic jargon; the trashier the art, and the less perceptible its merits, the more essential the critics' role ought to have become. But the critics now find themselves much less needed, after the emergence of a new sort of art buyer who is happiest to buy the trashiest thing (the art adviser is mostly there to warn about investment potential, not taste). For this reason I would not call Thornton's or Hickey's outburst cynical (it is harder to avoid the conclusion that Saatchi's was). They are upset, not really by the quality of art in the market — as we can see from their preferences — but by their increasing lack of influence on the market as critics/taste-makers. They have lost their role.

The real proof that their objections are not cynically contrived is their obvious devotion to "radical chic". It is the most interesting, and the most pathetically revealing, aspect of their expressed attitudes. It is also, of course, the source of their snobbery. Radical chic commands that they disdain any cause as soon as it should receive general, and especially commercial, acceptance; radical chic is reserved only for those in the know, the rebellious vanguard, the romantic and noble outsiders. So I am sure that Thornton and Hickey would be horrified to find themselves described as insiders. But insiders they are, by definition; radical chic by now rules the art world, it is the only route to success. Every art world insider must believe himself to be an outsider of superior principles (with the rare ability to recognise when a urinal is "classic") — if he didn't he would never have been invited inside! They are not kids, the Thorntons and the Hickeys,  yet they are obsessed by cool — they cannot bear to be near an art that has lost it. Thornton's fifth reason: "Oligarchs and dictators are not cool." She is right. She accepts that "Russian, Arab, and Chinese collectors bring liquidity to the art world", but we all know there is nothing chic about them. Hickey, reminiscing about the 1960s, had not realised that art was a "bourgeois" activity. "I used to sell hippy art..." He boasts that he came into art because of sex and drugs and radical artists "ferocious" about their work. In my earlier article I tried to explain how disturbing this transformation of the artist from bohemian to businessman would be to the radical, ‘progressive' psyche that dominates in arty circles, but I am not sure I gave the point enough emphasis.