The bright spot on the financial horizon is that – in theory at least – after a period of disinfection a new, sanitised world awaits us. In culture no parallel purge is necessary, because the arts in Britain are in blooming health. We know because arts bodies say so, ministers echo them, and most critics bring up the chorus. Against their judgments there can be no appeal: now that the arts have become a state religion, dissent would be sacrilege.

Nowhere is it suggested that the era of British boosterism that is crashing to its close in the City might have any counterpart in our galleries, theatres, fiction, films or television. At the start of the year of the shrivelling pound, James Purnell, then our culture secretary, said that in Britain a renaissance comparable to 15th-century Italy was under way: “This is not an overstatement, it’s exactly true.”

Governments and arts persons have a penchant for self-celebration that borders on the manic. Eight years after the dome fiasco, we have launched a four-year campaign of the arts. Partly this euphoria reflects our economic success, much of it now exposed as hollow, partly it is a genuine quickening in cultural life, but mainly it is temperamental.

For decades the puritanical British have been discovering sensuality in all its forms, and are mightily excited about it. Good things have come of this late maturation, and our loosening up would be an unqualified plus, were it not for our apparent conviction that in sex, food and the arts we are doing things nobody has done before, at which the world will wonder five centuries from now.

Contemporary art shows British boosterism at its most frenetic. What is sold as innovation to hedge funders is in fact a prime instance of Britain’s conservatism in art: it has taken us almost a century to get the Duchamp/Dada joke. Now we’ve got it we massacre it in the retelling. Hedge funders will now have the leisure to contemplate their quirky video or tin of excrement, and take what solace they can.

Ministers too act as cultural barkers, jollying the populace into museums whose less recent exhibits they have been trained, through a rigorously anti-elitist education, not to understand. At its worst the “arts industry” can be little more than a system of outdoor relief for slight or non-existent talent, or a source of windfall riches for artists who in politicised guise are hot-collared critics of the bonus culture in the City. Hypocrisy about cash is endemic. If art is our spiritual sustenance, the conscience of the era and an antidote to mammon, should not the fat cats of the art boom pass the hat to buy the two Titians, instead of parading their consciences in letters to The Times?

An even more fundamental truth concerns audiences. Large numbers of cultivated people (not just the more conservative ones) take it for granted that new British plays, novels and art are systematically oversold, and leave them alone. Nor do I know of many Londoners paying their own fares to wonder at our running renaissance in the city states of the north. Most cultural commentators travel there for a fee, return with glowing tales and don’t go back.

How much have market excesses and the booster mentality damaged the arts in other fields, such as publishing, theatre and opera, and what happens when the money men’s grins turn sour? Could penury enhance quality?

A more spartan culture could have attractions: fewer, shorter, more scrupulously edited books, a rest from blockbuster exhibitions in favour of less familiar artists, truthful films made on modest budgets with no stars and special effects. Maybe recession will throw up pleasant surprises. Could there be hidden treasures out there, things suppressed until now by the arts oligarchy and which a swing in fashion could bring to light?

Speaking truth to power is easy nowadays; think what wonders could be achieved for our cultural economy by an outbreak of truth-telling to our arts persons and “creatives”. Our model should be the young Frenchwoman who attended the opening of a modish exhibition of graffiti in Paris some years ago. Asked by Jack Lang, culture minister at the time and a modish fellow, whether she was enjoying the show, she shot back: “Just because I’m black doesn’t mean I’m sold out to subculture.”

Gloomy truths need telling, but there is no cause for gloom itself. Excellent local produce can still be found, and escape from provincial puffery is nowadays simple. Seriously good stuff, American mostly, is there in profusion: The Wire, The Rest is Noise (a history of 20th-century music by Alex Ross), a novel by Don DeLillo or Denis Johnson, a Coen brothers film, or MoMA, so embarrassingly superior to Tate Modern.

Alternatively you can take the train to Paris at a cost similar to Manchester, or the plane to Shanghai. Just don’t rely on the arts apparatchiks to tell you where to go.

Based on an article in The Times Literary Supplement of November 28

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