The art world was interesting to the Thorntons, and even more to the Hickeys, as an upper tier of radical chic. With their expert knowledge of the arbitrary rules, and arbitrarily changing tastes of cool, they were positioned to dictate to the clique. But with the spectacular arrival of the Russians, Arabs, and Chinese in the art world, coolness is no longer the first thing — these new players haven't the slightest understanding of the spiritual significance of "bohemia" in the decadent Western mind (a nice irony, considering that Thornton complained of having to write about "paintings by white American men more than is warranted"). A bohemian elite would subvert all values; absurd taste would become sophisticated taste for those in the know, in order to bemuse everyone else. But that process is terminated in the art world by these newly powerful players who so eagerly buy the bohemian product out of straightforwardly bad taste. Unfortunately for the art world insiders,  there is nothing at all ironic about these buyers' tolerance for vulgarity. The bohemian artists then discover that material success — money — can compensate satisfactorily for their personal loss of radical chic. For the experts though, the critics and curators, there is no compensation, only doom.

Will Gompertz, BBC Arts Editor and a former Director at the Tate, had an article in the Times about overrated contemporary art in British public collections. He anonymously interviewed a number of curators who apparently believed that their own superior judgments have been constrained by the power of investors. One of them told him that "very shiny, very expensive art is normally very bad".  All he really meant was that shiny expensive art grew uncool (because vulgarity became vulgar again). To such an art world insider, uncool and bad are the same thing. In my earlier piece, I wrote: "The aesthetic of superficiality, of shallow shiny rich, is dead and rotting... Now art seems ugly because it is expensive; before, it seemed beautiful, or at least fascinating, because expensive." I wonder if this curator found the shiny expensive art so bad five years ago.

Nowadays so much of this shiny expensive art languishes in public collections. And that is another reason why it has grown so unfashionable. Finally the art world insiders have realised — even if the rest of us realised years or decades ago — that nothing sponsored by the state is likely to be so radical. Gompertz (who worked at the Tate) has called for an exhibition of ‘bad art' to be mounted from the collections of MoMa, or the Tate, or the Pompidou, in order to provoke debate about public spending on art. But there is so much bad art to choose from! And, surely, the current displays of those museums make the point well enough, without even trying to.

Gompertz writes: "Never has so much expensive art been made, bought and sold, nor so little discourse applied to its merits." Yes, it is certainly time for proper discussion to discern some criteria for the judgment of art and decide on the real purpose of our modern museums. But this cannot be done until quality is untangled from cool. As we can see from the words of Thornton and Hickey, that untangling is most unlikely to be achieved by art world insiders, when their first interest in art so often turns out to be radical chic.

Gompertz hopes that "this is the start of something that breaks the system". He thinks that the art world has grown stale with state art, as it had in nineteenth-century Paris before the Impressionists. "We need artists to work outside the establishment", he argues. "We, the public, are the losers, provided as we are with only a partial view of contemporary art..." Absolutely. But there are and always have been plenty of artists working outside of the establishment. Even if sometimes their works belong to public collections, they are never hung, and their names remain known only to those who knew them personally — they are the legions of artists made invisible over the last century by radical chic. About this current crisis in taste, Gompertz writes: "Money, as ever, is at the root of the problem." Too much money is certainly making contemporary art uncool, but contemporary art's uncoolness is not our greatest problem, if it is a problem at all. And money is always only money. You can bet that money will be at the root of the solution to art's problems too. Radical chic really is at the root of the problem — it might even be the whole problem. It is radical chic, much more than money, that gives us such a partial view of contemporary art. The money only followed the glamour (then ruined it). Gompertz, so as not to be too gloomy, named Ai Wei Wei and Peter Doig as important artists working now. These are huge names raising millions for the auction houses and exhibiting only in the grandest modern museums. Peter Doig probably is the best of the gang of artists endorsed by those auctioneers and curators, the only artists to whom the general art public is ever introduced. But that is not to say, necessarily, that he is very good at all.