Every significant art movement has had its fair share of naysayers but the severest opponents of contemporary postmodernist art come not from outside the art world but from its very heart. It’s not individual artists or works insiders are objecting to — art itself, they believe, has taken a wrong turn, gone off the rails. Dave Hickey is the latest adversary on the list featuring prominent critics like David Kuspit, Michael Fried, Harold Rosenberg and Hilton Kramer who have seriously questioned the “anything goes” nature of contemporary art.

Writing for The Observer, Edward Helmore and Paul Gallagher report that doyen of American critics Dave Hickey has walked away from the ‘nasty, stupid’ world of modern art saying that anyone who has “read a Batman comic” would qualify for a career in the industry. A curator, professor and author known for a passionate defence of beauty in his collection of essays, The Invisible Dragon, and his wide-ranging cultural criticism, Hickey has launched a fierce attack on the contemporary art world which he says is calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing. “They’re in the hedge fund business, so they drop their windfall profits into art. It’s just not serious. Art editors and critics — people like me — have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It’s not worth my time,” he added.

At 71, Hickey has long been regarded as the enfant terrible of art criticism, respected for his intellectual range as well as his lucidity and style. He once states: “The art world is divided into those people who look at Raphael as if it’s graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it’s Raphael, and I prefer the latter.”

Hickey says the art world has acquired the mentality of a tourist. “If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst.

I’m just not interested in him.” He also believes art consultants have reduced the need for collectors to form opinions. “It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn’t understand, you’d have some obligation to guess. Now you don’t.”

Hickey’s outburst comes as a number of contemporary art curators at world famous museums and galleries have complained that works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn are the result of “too much fame, too much success and too little critical sifting” and are “greatly overrated”.

As a former dealer, Hickey is not above considering art in terms of relative valuation. But his objections stem from his belief that the art world has become too large, too unfriendly and lack discretion. “Is that elitist? Yes. Winners win, losers lose. Shoot the wounded, save yourself. Those are the rules,” Hickey said.

Another charge levelled at current art is that the “contemporary” by definition is not necessarily the “historical”. Contemporary art is a quantity of events associated in a specious present rather than a consistent narrative integrating some of these events in a system or pattern.

In his essay, The Contemporary and the Historical, critic Donald Kuspit remarks that “There may be a history of modern art and a history of traditional art, but there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading. Even if one was a Gibbon one could not fit all the pieces of contemporary art together in a unified narrative.

“In postmodernity there is no longer any such thing as the judgment of history, only an incomplete record of the contemporary. If every piece of art is contemporary, no one piece can be valued more highly than any other, except from a certain psychosocial perspective. But every perspective turns out to be procrustean because it shuts out art that contradicts its premises.”

The language we use to describe art is often fraught with obfuscation and in his article, A User’s Guide to Artspeak, Andy Beckett writing for The Guardian wonders, “Why do so many galleries use such pompous, overblown prose to describe their exhibits? Well, there’s now a name for it: International Art English. And you have to speak it to get on.” He says if you have been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes.

It is the ‘packing, promotion and reception’ of contemporary art that troubles Peter Timms. Yet another long time insider, art critic for The Age and editor of Art Monthly during the 1990s, Timms reveals in his new book, What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art that market demands to dominate and art has been corrupted and trivialised. The problem, he argues, extends to the way art is taught in art schools, the art that artists make, the collecting and curatorial methodologies of galleries and museums, funding criteria, the way that art is written about and the media’s depiction of art.

His drastic suggestion is, “ ... we need to shut down the so-called arts industry, drive off the money-changers, hucksters and spruikers, and acknowledge that art is not merely a business, an entertainment, an expression of national pride, or a substitute for political action, but a means of asking serious and profound questions about who we are, where we have come from, and where we might be going”.