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.