If the artist's job is to hold a mirror to reality, in recent years it has done this chillingly well. Far more than theatre, the novel or cinema, it is art that has recorded an age of insane speculation, mimicking its inanity and emptiness. Nothing will reveal the strangeness of credit capitalism more succinctly to future generations than the absurd prices reached at auction in recent years.

There is no false sentimentality in this sphere of the economy. The big auction houses were among the first businesses to announce staff culls, even though the market is dying with a whimper not a bang. Damien Hirst, too, has laid people off, while turning to online T-shirt sales. Museums, meanwhile, can only benefit from the fall in prices - which means we all benefit.

The end of the boom is only bad news for the con artists. The energy of British art in the early 1990s came about during recession, when there was only one British collector of note. Young artists now seem excited about the crash, hoping it might return them to that moment. A more troubling - or exciting - possibility is that, if the economy really is in as bad a mess as some say, art will have to rethink itself from the root. The worst crisis for a century, did someone say? A century ago, Picasso was making an art revolution that owed nothing to money. If art has to return to that ground zero it might even discover its reason for existing.