Triumph of market values at the Met

Can you guess who X is in the following quotation from a caption for an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: "X's Byzantium is similar to that of William Butler Yeats. Mosaics from Ravenna and the canon of religious icons offer incense-scented security and bold grandeur. If mosaic tesserae become more secular as embroidery on clothing, they still sparkle with their transcendent origins?"

Tesserae (cut cubes of marble - I looked it up), transcendence, mosaics, religious icons? Is it, perhaps some great artist of the Eastern empire, like the architect of the Church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople? Some visionary poet? Some painter who changed the way we look at the world?

Actually, the bit about the embroidery is the giveaway. The artist whom one of the world's great museums considers "similar" to Yeats is Gianni Versace, an Italian dress designer who, until he was murdered last July, hung around with all the right people.

Yesterday the Metropolitan opened an exhibition of his frocks that will be on show until the end of March. A central arbiter of modern taste has decided that his slashes and safety pins should hang with Van Eyck's Last Judgment and Picasso's Woman in White, with the statues from the Egyptian tomb of Meket-Recreated in 2010 BC and Canova's Perseus with the Head of Medusa.

Gianni's friends - Madonna and Elton John, Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, Sting and Courtney Love - were out in force for the $2,000 a head gala preview on Monday. As well they might be, for this was, in its own way, a historic moment. It marked the final - official - triumph of celebrity over value, of fame over judgment.

Versace is now a great, timeless artist. Says who? Well, darling, with friends like these who needs taste? If the new aristocracy of supermodels and pop stars thinks his work is up there with Picasso and Yeats, who is the Metropolitan Museum to disagree?

At one level, of course, this is merely funny. The delicious bathos of a line from the wall captions like "First a creator of practical and luxurious sportswear in the 1970s and 1980s, Versace realized a unique ideal in the 1980s" almost justifies the exercise. Anything that can get sportswear and unique ideals into the same sentence can't be all bad.

And there is some justice in the world when the idiots who put on the exhibition had to pay for their sins in the sheer self-abasement of burning up well-educated brain cells on prose like this (please do not adjust your sets): "The tasteful tabularasa of modern style is supplanted by Versace's voluptuous primacy of the body and given corporeal and fashion narrative by the attention-getting bridgings in glittery pins and bare flesh." This, in case you don't get it, is a description of Liz Hurley's famous safety-pin number.

But the corruption of language, as Orwell pointed out, is usually a sign of some greater corruption. And when a major repository of western culture has to resort to the ludicrous circumlocutions of estate agency ads, then something serious is going on.

The serious thing is not that the celebocracy think that their dead pal is a timeless genius. These are, after all, mostly the sort of people who buy paintings by the square metre. The problem is that the cultural establishment - the massive accumulation of skill and study and judgment represented by an institution like the Metropolitan - is no longer either willing or able to stand up to them.

IT DOESN'T even matter so much that artists like Yeats and Proust (whose name is also smeared all over the exhibition's accompanying text) are debased by having their achievements placed in the service of a man who was good at dressing rich women for gala premieres.

What matters is not that they are dragged down to Versace's level, but that he is elevated to theirs. Making wealthy women look like showgirls, which is essentially what he was good at, is being held up as an achievement of the same moral, even spiritual, value as the greatest art produced by humankind through the ages.

And it's not that they wish to make a case that Gianni was a misunderstood man. That he was really doing something more profound than making women look like showgirls. On the contrary, in the museum's introduction to the show, this ability of his is explicitly endorsed: "Versace chose the prostitute as his exemplum, just as Toulouse-Lautrec had prized her unlikely virtues and ambivalent freedoms in the 1880s and 1890s. Within this ideal, Versace identified a strong sensuous woman of unabashed, unashamed sexuality."

Leave aside the intellectual prostitution involved in throwing in words like "exemplum" and art historical references to Toulouse-Lautrec, no less, to sell us a stupid comparison. (Toulouse saw and expressed the humanity in whores; Versace saw and expressed the whores in one half of humanity.)

Concentrate on the word "ideal". The ideal, the exemplary model of womanhood, is the prostitute. And the creator of this ideal is a great artist, one of those rare individuals who has transformed the everyday stuff of life into some kind of truth. An ability to breathe new life into a vulgar, crass and insulting stereotype of women is an achievement that cultured people everywhere ought to admire.

This is the triumph, not just of celebrity, but of market values: prostitution is, after all, the ultimate expression of the free market. The exhibition is the apotheosis of advertising. Fashion designers like Versace have been at the forefront of a new kind of capitalism, one in which the value of a commodity lies not in its usefulness or its quality but in its label. A suit is not a suit but an Armani. A pair of underpants is not a pair of underpants but a Calvin Klein creation. A shoe is not a comfortable and attractive covering for your foot but a Bruno Magli. A bag is not something to hold your keys and lipstick but a Prada accessory.

THE "surplus value" that Marx, poor devil, thought was the expression of the labour of the workers is now the fetishistic allure of a designer brand name. This isn't a reality only for the glitterati - it affects all of us all the time. Try persuading your daughter to wear Dunnes Stores runners rather than Nike trainers to school, and this new reality will scream in your face.

Advertising - and media events like Liz Hurley's safety-pin dress are a specialised and especially effective form of advertising - has pulled off the extraordinary stunt of giving brand name and designer labels the same enchanted aura that attaches to great works of art. The label "Versace" on a piece of gaudy cloth has the same enchantment as the signature "Picasso" on a painting.

There is indeed an ineffable logic in Versace ending up in the Metropolitan Museum. The art market led where consumer culture has followed, defining the value of an object by the label attached to it. It is but a short step from deciding that, say, a beautiful painting is worth infinitely more when the label "Caravaggio" can be attached to it to deciding that a creator of famous labels is a peer of Caravaggio. In that depressing sense, Versace probably belongs, after all, in the greatest museum in the greatest commercial city.