Art as we know it is finished

Art, according to The Guardian's Jonathan Jones, is dead. Bemoaning the trend towards glitziness and celebrity obsession, Jones argues that artists, following the market, have given up doing work of emotional and social substance. Shirking its responbility as an arbiter of truth, art has "aspire[d] to be all the things fashion is." But in a crisis of debt that's shaken global ecomomies and stoked social conflict, Jones writes that art is "about to be exposed as nothing more than the decor of an age of mercantile madness,"

On top of softening sales following the global economic slump, art must respond to the larger moment, the widening gulf between the top 1% of society — consumers of the type of work pictured above — and the other 99% who, as brought to our awareness by the global Occupy movement, face an increasingly  "authentic" struggle to get by every day.

It's just another thread in the knotty question of where art goes after post-modernism. 

(I've added images by the artists Jones mentions in his article: Marc Quinn, Leon Kossof, Frank Auerbach, Paula Rego, Quinn again, and Antony Gormley)