Business as usual. Three market heavy hitters came into the spot-light in London this autumn: Damien Hirst had his $200 million sale at Sotheby's, and blockbuster shows of Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko opened at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, respectively. What can we make of this meeting of titans, the meeting of money and art, great minds striving for ultimate meaning? Financial meltdown, but the mad parade continues — is the art market going to die? If it did, would it matter?

From the opening lot on the first night of the Hirst sale, September 15, the day Lehman Brothers fell, it was clear the event was going to be a success. The publicity leading up to it said "miracle," while the show of product on several floors of Sotheby's London base was amazing for its combination of the vast and the dull. So many animals behind glass with philistine special effects added on to appeal to new markets: gold-plated vitrines, gold horns, hooves, and a gold halo — so many "drawings" faking spontaneous energy — so much bright, mindless, primitive color for philistines. Anxiety about status was the real content of this show. But then the sale started, the miracle prophecy fulfilled itself, and the junk went flying off the walls.

The atmosphere was strange. Famous bidders in the seats in front of the auctioneer looked subdued — depressed, even — thinking about something else. The staff taking phone bids, lined up in front of a shiny surface with long narrow shelves supporting upright cigarette butts (telling us about cancer) were like puppets: holding up their phones, gesticulating, frowning, acting in a play. The press scrum in their ordinary clothes: scribbling, taking photos, asking each other to remind them what the last lot went for. It was only the second auction I've ever been to, the first being the sale at Sotheby's New York 20 years ago of the contents of Andy Warhol's house after he died. At the Hirst one, Sarah Thornton, Artforum online diarist and the author of a new book full of leaden reverence for bullshit called Seven Days in the Artworld, introduced herself to me, which was confusing, as I'd just read in the back of her book that I'd given her an interview for it. But unreality was the theme of the evening. So many lots going for way over the asking price, but no vibe of human excitement to accompany it.

At the press conference afterward, there was applause, but when I looked around, I saw the press silently writing in their notebooks. The cheers all came from Sotheby's staff and Hirst's accountant, Frank Dunphy. The aftermath of the miracle saw the arrival of the Damien Hirst Art Shop next door to Sotheby's, where ordinary people can buy cheap knockoffs by Hirst of his own expensive crap. The key to Hirst is the market as material. He notices you can get big sales without any real visual ideas. Crass impact will do. Anything brightly colored or tackily grim will keep the product brand going. Of course, Rothko and Bacon get the same prices at auction. It's not that money is evil but simply that it's arbitrary.

Hirst hearts Bacon   Hirst's conscious remakes of famous sights by Bacon have always been his worst stuff. He had some good hits in the first few years of his career, which almost justify the link to Bacon. One of them was a cow's head being eaten by maggots (A Thousand Years, 1990). Bacon himself had a long look at this work when it was shown in the Saatchi Collection and praised it to a journalist, saying, "It really worked." He might have appreciated the way the flies make a kind of spray of black dots, like shading in an etching. Bacon's geometric rectangles are there in the edges of the two square vitrines in which the buzzing gore is housed. Something nasty in something geometric — this was a layout formula of Bacon's, and with this work Hirst redoes it in an original, imaginative leap.

Hirst owns several Bacons he paid a lot of money for at auctions, and he has often said his early inspiration as an artist came from Bacon's interviews with David Sylvester. He says he tried to paint like Bacon when he was young but then realized sculptures could express whatever the point was more clearly. Recently, he's been saying that he's about to try some paintings again, real ones, with his own touch and his own brushstrokes, and so on. But this isn't promising much, when the aspect of Bacon that Hirst goes on about the most is the least serious one: Bacon's statements about futility.

There are different ways of responding to art. When Hirst redoes a Bacon triptych in sculpture form (skinned sheep with their legs arranged in a fussy way and a lot of bric-a-brac stuck in, like sinks and umbrellas), it doesn't add anything to what you already know from Bacon's paintings. Bacon refers to art history, but he's using paint, its materiality — he reinterprets what he's seen in art, but in order to do it he changes what he's seen and takes you somewhere new.

Which is not to say that Hirst adds nothing to art in some other stuff he's done. His genius lies in his presentational skills. They are best seen in the way he designs exhibitions, putting one thing next to another, making difference sting. Sometimes an individual object will do it; a lot of his spot paintings both mock the idea of anyone's laboring intensely over getting color relationships right and achieve really good color relationships. As Hirst has gotten worse over the years, with uninspired presentations of Christian iconography, for example, he still brings a flair for gloss to the occasion, transforming a show of pure idiocy, such as his exhibition "Romance in the Age of Uncertainty" at White Cube in 2003 — in which flayed cows' heads were given the names of saints and jagged glass stood for pain — into something almost worth thinking about. "Almost" has become less and less the issue, though, culminating in the art at Sotheby's this past fall, with stuck-on diamonds and gold failing to disguise all-too-obvious artistic deadness.

Bacon survives his own clichés   David Sylvester's book of interviews with Bacon is the one great exception to the rule of creepiness that governs Bacon literature. Sylvester (who died in 2001) was a careful, thoughtful writer, so the hysteria effect that usually dominates any account of Bacon's greatness is minimized. From Sylvester's encounters with him, Bacon appears to have been clear about the difference between content and form. Content for him has to do with despair and the gruesomeness of existence, the hopelessness of everything, which is fair enough for the times, the postwar era. But form comes from art history: the excitement of painting, its subtlety and drama, the magnificence of what has been achieved in the past.

Bacon constantly returns Sylvester to paint, discussing the way it has its own communicability, and how distortion in a figurative image doesn't mean violence but energy — aesthetic excitement rather than melodrama. "Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system, and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain. If you can talk about it, why paint it?" There's always a lot going on in a Bacon: rooms, people, ashtrays, bloody entrails, mirrors with reflections, watches, glass tables, mattresses, and lightbulbs. But are they really there? Aren't they all hallucinations — pretenses for the real concern, which is abstract pleasure? Bacon goes off as an artist only when he's very old: you see dry, boring effects, his old stuff redone badly. In previous decades, being "illustrational" isn't a crime; he is illustrational, but that isn't the heart of what he's doing. But in works of the late 1970s, it is: the result is nasty colors and surfaces and no feel for anything.

A wall label in the Tate Britain show says, "His approach was to distort appearance in order to reach a deeper truth about his subjects." But he distorts his subjects because he doesn't care about them. What he's really about is finding a place for all sorts of things that have been learned from art history. Lying Figure (1969) is a human body on a bed, which has nothing to say about bodyness and is just another bit of unbelievable figuration in a melting, unreal space that tells you that bodies are not really what Bacon is interested in. The reason is that he's only painting — or he's painting, this fantastic activity. He's enjoying himself, and he's doing something really abstract. The key to Bacon is the same for Rothko: painting pays homage to Painting. Bacon constantly undermines the sort of ways in which people are asked to relate to him. As with Rothko, he doesn't create objects of torment but objects of joy.

Rothko playful   Rothko gets an amazing level of visual drama out of pared-back painting emphasizing basic abstract elements. Tate Modern's "Rothko: The Late Series" is based on works resulting from his 1958 commission for murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York's then-new Seagram building (designed by Mies van der Rohe), which all share a muted, looming quality. He completed 30 works over several years but returned the money early on and (moved by its collection of Turners) eventually decided the Tate Gallery was a better home for the work. The donated Rothkos finally arrived at the Tate on February 25, 1970, the day he committed suicide. Others ended up in various collections around the world. Now Tate Modern brings 16 of them together for the first time in one big, low-lit space. It's not architecturally marvelous, and the hang is confusing, not elegant, but the works are so strong, so truly playful, and so profoundly serious, the effect is overwhelming.

Did Rothko hate life and welcome death and fervently believe world doom was a just reward for all the shallow people whose philistinism he had to suffer — it's an evil money culture with no place for art? If he ever did think like this it was the mental illness taking over. Rothko as sacrificial victim or saint is after-the-fact literary romanticism, the van Goghification of Rothko. But van Gogh killed himself because he was mentally ill, not because he sold only one painting. And such illness for both of them isn't the same as being too sensitive for this world.

There was a lot of death in Rothko's life: the pogroms in Russia, which his family fled from, and the Jewish Holocaust in the Second World War. Clement Greenberg once said, "Death is an overrated literary conceit." The conceit doesn't play the same way anymore. The death that Damien Hirst drivels on about to journalists is a different deal — banal, adolescent, the level of thought that people in his circle are capable of, people who are not thick exactly but not highly literate either or at home with ideas (as opposed to the conceptual-art "ideas" in their press releases).

Is death even really all that interesting an idea as Rothko's subject? It is the rhetoric of his time and of his sensibility, but it doesn't mean that is always how his work has to be read. Rothko's death rhetoric fails to survive the test of time but is given a lurid semblance of an afterlife by a middlebrow culture-vulture audience that used to ignorantly despise him for being a charlatan, but now knows you're supposed to vaguely pretend he's full of spirituality, and they think his dark colors equal death. Death-as-meaning leads to all sorts of wrong ideas being attached to his actual death, which was not a symbolic prelude to the evil present but a meaningless, appalling, and tragic event. It doesn't say Andy Warhol is evil. (Rothko and Warhol came face-to-face with each other on the street once by accident; Rothko shuddered and turned away.) Or that money is evil or even that Rothko was great. He was great and remains so, but it's his art that tells us that. Not because it's somber but because it has great visual authority.

"Yippee, We're All Going to Die" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.