Most contemporary fine art is moribund crap and wouldn’t last five minutes out there in the cultural open air, where it would soon be winnowed out by those great howling tsunamis of I-Know-What-I-Like; it desperately requires an entire support-system in order to keep it alive, and it’s as well that all concerned with the art world get a clear picture of what’s involved. In this very brief excursus I aim to identify how to indefinitely extend the lives of these esthetic stillbirths, to the greater advantage of gallerists, investors, curators, critics -- and, of course, the artists themselves.

First let us consider the coefficient of authenticity and originality. It’s a common assumption of the callow and the self-seeking that neither is required in the contemporary art world. Not so. A modicum of either one or the other is a necessity, and for a true sufficiency both must be present. It’s axiomatic that most of the people who buy most of the art are mostly devoid of either authenticity or originality -- which is why they’re attracted to collecting contemporary art in the first place; therefore the artists must be able -- at least initially -- to make good the deficiency.

In former ages, artists also needed to be able to make good the cultural deficiency of their buyers -- but fortunately postmodernism has obviated the need for this, reducing all hierarchies of esthetics to a typology of the decorative. So, now, all the stupid and crass rich need to be able to pronounce are certain buzz words -- the names of artists, methodologies, schools -- in order to be considered as justifying their own place among the elite of the zeitgeist.

It is quite possible for an artist to continue to produce highly financially viable work long after he has been sucked dry of his integrity by these vampiric creatures, but it’s better for all concerned if he does retain a secret chamber -- or garret -- within which he continues to suffer. The psychological state of the artist who sells for high prices in the contemporary market can be likened to that of a Soviet citizen during the Terror: inside his psychic garret he continues manfully to suffer existential crises -- and even to go hungry; but on the outside he is drinking Kristal, chatting amiably and accepting yet another canapé.

The second factor to note is the role of the critic (under which heading I subsume everyone from newspaper reviewers to academic art historians and prancing TV pundits) in the contemporary art world. If John Ruskin were alive today and could see quite how irrelevant the critic has become to the transaction of the business of contemporary art, he would probably tear his own penis off, varnish it liberally, and put it on sale in a provincial craft gallery. Because contemporary art is bought by stupid people, they cannot read contemporary art criticism -- which anyway has become exponentially more gnomic. Indeed, it’s arguable that there is some kind of inverse correlation between stupid buyers and recondite critics.

As with artistic integrity, this state of affairs is often taken to imply that the tyro artist can do without discursive -- let alone formal -- commentary at all. Not so. The critic may write toxic eye-bleeding-inducing prose read by no one, but she is still an essential participant in the triage that takes place on the cultural battlefield: laying down a heavy covering barrage of jargon so that the casualty (artwork) can be stretchered into the operating space of the gallery. It’s true that as it is with the figurative, so it is with conceptual: only a small proportion of "artworks" will actually "make it," but then none at all would survive were it not for an expeditiously applied newsprint tourniquet.

Which brings us, logically enough, to the operating theatre itself: it is not without accident that the signature private galleries of the last 30 years -- the Saatchi and the White Cube -- should have unconsciously aped the pictorial space of surgical rendering. If you want to keep terminal artworks alive you must have an antiseptic environment with ready access to large transfusions of financial liquidity. The key significance of investment in the construction and mediation of "‘value" in the contemporary art world has been much anatomized, and I don’t propose to hack away at the cadaver myself, except to note that we haven’t witnessed quite such willingness -- on the part of the gallerist as much as the artist -- to kiss rich arse, since the time of the Medici.

Does it matter? After all plus ca change. . . and yet, there is a jarring dissonance contained in the notion of conceptual art as interior decoration for Modernist people-barns. Bill Gates has got it about right when he "hangs" LCD displays around his walls, each one beaming out an image of an Old Master. And, arguably, Damien Hirst has got it right as well with his cabinets full of pill pots, and his vitrines coiled with the ganglia of medical technology. Hirst’s works only make explicit what is implicit in the whole socialized medicine of the contemporary art world -- and isn’t it amazing that there’s still a waiting list for admission?

This essay originally appeared in Laura K. Jones, ed., A Hedonist’s Guide to Art (Hg2).

WILL SELF is a novelist and journalist. He lives in London.