The art world is one of the most corrupted components of British society.  It is filled with talentless professional eccentrics, poseurs and intellectual frauds and lightweights who daub with faeces and trade in pure shock value or boorish mundanity.

What might have been excusable were it no more than the surviving rump of 20th century modernism, refining perhaps the irony of Duchamps and Dali but not their outrageousness, has completely taken over the asylum.  As Prince Charles famously said of architecture, the avant garde has become the establishment.  It seems that there is no way back, for the structure of patronage and schooling which produced the great art of our European past cannot be replicated.  Democracy, capitalism and the state have killed it off absolutely and forever.

The consequence, quite apart from the flight from beauty and the total failure of draughtsmanship, is that the general public has become hopelessly innured to badness.  It traipses along to the galleries to be baffled, amused, entertained by the shock of the bad - in the process, naturally enough, creating a demand for more and yet more and worse badness.  We know it’s all crudely unintellectual schlock of the lowest order, a sublime joke in which some Highfallutin Johnny Expert informs us with a perfectly straight face as to that before which we must genuflect.  But still, it seems, we genuflect.

Back outside in the real world, though, we yearn for beauty and visual order.  We stubbornly plaster our living room walls with scurrilously incorrect Jack Vettriano prints, and the real things sells at Sotheby for $1.3 million.

The key to all this, naturally, is the teat of state and institutional funding.  An art commissariat has interposed itself twixt producer and consumer and imposed its own political aesthetic.  Thus, in an act of superb official spite and rampant deconstructism, the empty fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square - the heart of British imperial glory - has been planted with naff rubbish since 1999.

The first “challenge” to our prejudices about national art was an apparently homosexual Christ - “at the very least a political leader of an oppressed people” - by Mark Wallinger.  It is titled Ecce Homo.  It survived the oppression of the pigeons for the allotted eighteen months, to be followed by Bill Woodrow’s Regardless of History.  This reveals unto us “the supremacy of nature over civilisation ... as it may be observed in the jungles of South America or Thailand, where deserted temples have been reclaimed by the nature we exploit.”  As a statement of national decline it has some merit, I suppose.  But not much - just about on a par for profundity with John Maynard Keynes’ “In the long run we’re all dead.”  Next up was a perspex box made by Rachel Whiteread.  She calls it Monument.  Her monumental concept, opening hitherto unknown higher imperiums of thought, was “a pause: a quiet moment for the space”.

I think the hustle-bustle of city life is back with us once again though, and Monument has been replaced by Marc Quinn’s gratuitously offensive and politically aggressive Alison Lapper Pregnant.  In eighteen month’s time we will get Thomas Schütte’s Hotel for the Birds.  God help us.  But none of it would be possible if, as in so many fields of public life, self-hate, cultural marxism and activism on the public purse had been thoroughly throttled at birth.  For that, blame Margaret Thatcher’s narrow political focus.  She had the opportunity.  She never saw the cultural left coming.

Cultural left activism is the scourge of white Britons’ lives.  It should be plain to all that the empty plinth is already art, a statement of decline, of waiting for greatness to return.  But the left cannot stand before the greatness of Britain’s imperialist past or see itself as a void.  It must insist that the scarring of society today, the feminism and buggers’ rights, the anti-racism, all the hatred it pours upon us is really wonderfully superior.  It considers these the best of times, as indeed they are for self-hatred.

The end product of self-hating art is, sadly, not the hater’s suicide.  That takes too much integrity.  No, it is petty vandalism.  So I was somewhat surprised today to read that the Scottish Arts Council will not be funding the strange Mark McGowan for “keying” (scratching) seventeen private vehicles around the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow’s West End in March and thirty in Camberwell, south London, all in the immortal name of art.  After all, who can blame the poor sap for thinking that is precisely the sort of thing he, as an artist, is supposed to do?  I don’t.