Straight after the interval at the recent Fashion Rocks event at the Albert Hall, the Stooges, representing Versace, took to the stage and did their level best to ignite the occasion. The grizzly American garage band that invented punk rock back in 1970 – whose second long-player, Funhouse, is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential rock albums of all time, fêted by everyone from Johnny Rotten to Bobby Gillespie – proved to be the aural gingivitis on the event’s perfect veneer, ripping through the corporate atmosphere with the crunching opening chords of I Wanna Be Your Dog. The bare-torso’d lead singer, apparently carved out of stained wenge and dancing like a hyperactive gibbon, adopted his usual burping baritone, bawling about canine sex, S&M and submission. It was quite a performance.

But before we got to the first chorus, a wealthy friend-of-a-friend, one of those NetJets-chartering, four-storey Chelsea house, hedge-fund types in his late thirties, tapped me on the shoulder. “Who the hell is that?” he asked, cluelessly gesturing towards the simian-limbed singer. “That,” I said, my incredulity barely disguised, “is Iggy Pop.”

“Never heard of him,” came the shrugging reply. I felt properly piqued for my beloved Iggy. The godfather of punk, impassively dismissed by a rich guy in an Armani dinner jacket. Yes, I know Iggy Pop never really sold any records. He’s not on any power list or best-dressed list. Politically speaking, he’s no Bono, and he’s not married to anyone famous. He didn’t do Live Earth, doesn’t show up as a “mentor” on The X Factor, and will probably never be inducted into any hall of fame. But he is culturally significant. He is a survivor, an innovator, a character, an untamed rock’n’roll animal.

More to the point, my ignorant friend: where the hell have you been? Did you not get the American punk-rock memo during your teens? Was there no NME or MTV in your house?

Say hello to the new breed of Cash Rich/Culturally Bankrupt (CR/CB) multi-millionaire. These are the men who work from 6am to 8pm, have the house, the car and the size-zero wife, but no eye or natural inclination for art, no time for movies, can’t see the point in reading novels, and were too busy doing lucrative deals to ever get with the zeitgeist where music was concerned. Yet they have the aching, nagging, cloying feeling that they really should make an effort.

There was a time when this guy would have to submit to a comfy but naff, gin’n’Jag life of golfing casuals, chesterfield sofas, hunting scenes on the walls of his Virginia Water mansion and Richard Clayderman albums playing on the stereo. Not any more. Now a rich man can become culturally aware, dinner-party-standard knowledgeable about contemporary art, even skirt around the edges of hip music circles, simply by throwing lots of money at the problem.

Ubiquitous DJ Dan Lywood is here to help. He puts together soundtracks for fashion shows by Vivienne Westwood and Givenchy. But Lywood also works as a music consultant, constructing bespoke libraries for private clients: usually wealthy, youngish people, for whom music was an unimportant, possibly career-hindering diversion while they were growing up.

For many of us, the idea of not having experienced the joys of sticky-floored warehouse parties, mosh pits and the urgent, critical soundtracks of youth, is completely unthinkable. When you’ve had music in your life since you were a kid, when you’ve grown up going to gigs, swapping records and studiously rocking a “look”, pop culture is second nature. You just sort of . . . know.

“But there are a lot of people who never had music in their homes or at their strict boarding schools,” says Lywood. “These are the guys who worked through their twenties, have an enormous house and are just starting to relax a bit and discover good times.”

And that means a topsy-turvy life, with youth lived later – at, say, 35. With the mortgage paid, kids sired and schooled, investments made and money accruing silly interest in the bank, these people see a whole new world open up. Hedonistic vacations in Ibiza are taken, metronomic house music is suddenly “discovered”, lavish parties thrown and DJs hired. And, hey, maybe I’ll move to Brick Lane.

“Some have kitted out their houses with supersophisticated £10,000 music systems, but the one thing that will be missing is the music,” says Lywood. “Sometimes there’s next to nothing to work with – just an old Phil Collins CD and some compilation albums that came free with the Daily Mail. I’ll ask them what they want, and they might say, ‘Ibiza.’ ” Nothing wrong with that, of course. A newly acquired music library is a quick, cool fix that affects only the City type who purchases it. But there is a problem here. Music is socially useful, but it is benign, fiscally dormant aural wallpaper – it doesn’t “do” anything. Ditto novels. Our man understands that it’s worth slogging through the biography of a Forbes-listed billionaire, because he gets to learn something useful about money. But spend a fortnight reading a 300-pager by McEwan, Roth or Hollinghurst – what’s in it for him? There’s no return, no profit to be made, so why bother?

When the CR/CB man discovers art, things are different. A little knowledge and a lot of money can be a dangerous thing. Seismic cultural changes can be caused by entry-level art collectors getting all overcompetitive, buying into something new because they think it’s what they should be doing at their stage of wealth and life. The newly rich masters of the universe easily get their head around modern art because in recent years it has proved to be such a reliable investment. But best of all, it makes dough for them as they sleep. That’s more like it.

How much money? Consider this. Back in February, Sotheby’s presented seven works by Banksy in a sale of contemporary art. One was Bombing Middle England (2001), an acrylic and spray-paint stencil on canvas, featuring a trio of retired types playing bowls with spherical, cartoon-style bombs. Banksy’s work is not hard to appreciate – he’s no Frank Auerbach or Cy Twombly – and comes with the added benefit of instant street cred. Hollywood celebrities own Bansksys. He’s always in the papers. His stuff fetches crazy money. This particular work had a guide price of £30,000-£50,000. It sold for £102,000.

The artist responded to the Sotheby’s sale by posting a picture on his website, featuring an auctioneer presiding over a crowd of rapt bidders, with the caption, “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit”. Was this the art-world equivalent of a Gerald Ratner moment, or a double bluff? Maybe, just maybe, Bansksy was being truthful to our overwrought CR/CB man?

So how does CR/CB get in on the act? After all, he can’t spend his valuable Saturdays cruising the galleries of Spitalfields and Cork Street hoping to find the next Chapman brothers. He needs a more intensive, exclusive, focused approach. He could become one of the Serpentine Gallery’s Future Contemporaries. Aimed at people under 39 years old (and based on the opinion of the gallery’s director Julia Peyton-Jones that “there is nothing more glamorous than announcing that you are ‘a collector’ ”), membership provides access to special events and curator-and artist-led tours of private and corporate collections and exhibitions. Arty advice comes from a board of cutting-edge groovers, including Dan Macmillan and Christopher Taylor, who fronts the psychedelic country rock band Menlo Park and runs his own gallery, Museum 52. Taylor finds that the people on the programme are quick to learn. “They’ll look at a piece of art and say, ‘How’s this guy’s career going?’, or ‘Has the work sold well at auction recently?’ ” Smug trendies might laugh at the late-adopting CR/CB types because they always seem to be one or three steps behind. They are the ones signing up for the Shoreditch House membership just as the heat came off those heady Thursday nights. They are the ones paying silly money for Damien Hirsts, Tracey Emins and Banksy pieces, when all the properly cool people were given them because they’re “friends”.

But really, one shouldn’t sneer, because these people are actually driving the cool economy. They might be wearing the wrong trousers, but they are paying the bar tabs and coughing up full retail prices for the designer labels, while the cool people are blagging free drinks and nicking clothes off the PR. Think of cool society personified by Kate Moss, then have it financed by a Philip Greenesque fat-cat figure, and you’ll start to get the picture.

Make no mistake, there’s always some rich guy footing the bill for the trendy party. It’s what you call acquired taste.