London art fair on 16 October 2013. Photograh: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
I was one of those idiots who passed by the Banksy stall in Central Park last weekend. Like everyone else, I presumed the look-a-like canvasses to be fakes. At $60 a pop, how could they be otherwise? Except they weren't. It was another one of those now-you-see-me-now-you-don't Banksy tricks. Had I known better, I would have been thousands of dollars up. And that, I suppose, was Banksy's point: modern art is all about the dollars, something to discuss seriously with your financial adviser.
I wasn't kicking myself because I missed out on an affordable Banksy. I was kicking myself because I missed out on a whopping profit. And seeing all those flash silver cars from Frieze art fair chauffeuring VIPs around London to yet another champagne reception, one can readily see his point. Contemporary art has become the purest expression of modern capitalism, embodying that irritating amoral dictum: something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it.
Over at Tate Britain, they are staging an exhibition of British iconoclasm. Beginning at the Reformation, the exhibition tells the story of art under attack, of smashed statues and defaced paintings. Originally, of course, iconoclasm was a religious phenomenon. Abraham's father, Terah, was an idol-maker from Ur. One day Terah left the young Abraham in charge of his shop, whereupon he smashed all the idols with a stick. "It was terrible," Abraham explained to his father. "The small idols got hungry and they started fighting for food and finally the large idol got angry and broke them into pieces." Terah didn't believe him. "Idols don't get hungry, they don't get angry, they don't speak – they're just idols." Abraham smiled, knowingly. "Then why do you worship them?" he replied. This famous Jewish midrash is not in the Bible, but explains something of the deep biblical hostility to idolatry. Here are the emotional origins of monotheism. And, taking things one step further, perhaps the emotional origins of contemporary atheism too. Both involve desecration.
But modern art found a way of domesticating Abraham's powerful idol-smashing instincts by allowing itself to be continually driven by the iconoclastic urge. Or rather, to be driven by iconoclasm simply for its own sake. It is arguable that the ur-instincts of contemporary art began as a reaction against those western traditions of beauty that were seen to have done so little to ward off the horrors of two world wars. That is, they had a seriousness of moral purpose. But smashing idols soon became the aesthetic of a rebel without a cause, idol-smashing artists themselves being idol smashed.
In 1994, unemployed artist Mark Bridger poured black ink into Damien Hirst's sheep in formaldehyde sculpture, re-christening it Black Sheep. A few years later, a couple of men bounced up and down on Tracey Emin's bed in an act of so-called performance art. And in 2012, Vladimir Umanets graffitied his name and the nonsensical words "a potential piece of yellowism" on a Rothko in the Tate. Iconoclasm had lost its purpose, being diminished to the proportions of a pretentious and obscure self-referencing conversation between unknown artists.
Without any sort of deeper cause than this, it is unsurprising that contemporary art has become so vulnerable to a takeover bid from the money men – something the excellent Grayson Perry has began so fine job of excoriating in his Reith lectures, exposing art-speak gobbledygook as a false substitute for genuine meaning and aesthetic value. Perhaps it was ever thus. Or perhaps the only genuine iconoclasm in an age of continual iconoclasm is belief itself. For the whole point of iconoclasm is that it clears away the rubbish for something more important to present itself.