Jeff Koons started to produce his inflatable objects as a critique of American consumerism in the 1970s. Consumerism continues to flourish in the US today, as it does in all Western capitalist countries, but with one of Koons’ inflatables recently selling for $91million (the most expensive work by a living artist ever to be sold at auction), has the artist’s work become a symptom of the very order he meant to critique?

Artists are a sort of ’cultural filter’. They absorb all the inputs provided by socio-political circumstances, literature, philosophy, indeed everything that connotes their particular era. Then they elaborate all these concepts, ideas and values, and express them through their highly individual aesthetic. Ultimately, the final outcome is the production of significant objects which add value to society, contributing to our understanding of culture as it is, and helping to shape whatever comes next.

One question we can ask ourselves is this: what do the artworks produced over the last 20 years tell us about our society?

Celebrity artists such as Koons or Damien Hirst have built personal empires on the aesthetics and ideas that might have been impactful at the moment of their inception, but have since become a predictable redundancy for sale purposes. This is partly because the art market pushes artists to follow the demand of their signature works, pressurising them to produce tired replicas of ideas that lost relevance 20 years ago. But how can the art world’s ‘frontmen’ shape what’s to come if they are stuck in this cycle of cultural repetition?

In recent decades, art has undoubtedly lost some of its capability to inspire social progress. But the times are changing, and the youngest generations (the jeeringly titled ‘millenials’ and ‘generation Zs’) are leading the way. A recent survey found that today’s young people are disillusioned; their economic and socio-political optimism is at record lows. But out of this disillusionment has come a drive for positive change in the community, and from the school strike for climate to the rise of #MeToo, today’s youth are holding society to account by standing up and taking acting.