The Frieze Art Fair represents Britain's acceptance into the global art world. It is as if, from an art point of view, we are finally free of mad cow disease. All the cool galleries are setting up stall for this second edition in London's Regent's Park: Marian Goodman from New York, Galerie Daniel Buchholz from Cologne and Hauser and Wirth from Zurich. In such company, I feel like Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday, trying to reassure his American backers that London is going places while the IRA keeps blowing up his organisation in front of their eyes.  The Frieze Art Fair is a celebration, an upbeat moment for London to congratulate itself on becoming one of the world's art capitals. But this follows an annus terribilis for British contemporary art. It was a disastrous year not because of the meaningless and arbitrary fact that a fire in an east London warehouse destroyed some important works from Charles Saatchi's collection, including Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell, but - far more seriously - because of the emotions the incident licensed. These can best be described as glee, hilarity and hate: finally, many people seemed to feel Saatchi and Tracey Emin and everything they stood for were getting their comeuppance. Anyone who thought the opening of Tate Modern, the Turner prize and, now, the Frieze Art Fair, mean the British love new art has to think again.  Britain is not free of mad cow disease. We have a long history of scepticism towards modernity and, under the surface, that atavism still blazes and boils. I am not sure if I would want it any other way when I consider what contemporary art gets up to when left to its own devices - say, at the Venice biennale - without the lurid tabloid hostility and middle class revulsion that used to keep British art uneasy and, therefore, young.  The Frieze fair is an opportunity to see, experience and buy what is new in art. But what is that, exactly? Is it Emma Kay's subjective world histories, Aleksandra Mir's surreal happenings, Adam Chodzko's disruptive meetings, all of which are featured? And why do some of us crave it when so many others despise it?  Western art has a far deeper tradition of newness than music or literature. This is worth stressing, because on both sides of the cultural divide between people who loathe and love "contemporary art", there are some extraordinary misunderstandings about how new the cult of the new actually is. In the 1960s, the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth divided art into that made before and after Marcel Duchamp. He argued that the early 20th century dadaist who invented the ready-made and the dry, allegorical brain-art of the Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) inaugurated a new, "philosophical" art.  Whether you take Kosuth and "conceptual art" as your dividing mark, or Andy Warhol's silkscreen paintings, uninﬂected films and (apparently) empty self-image, or Donald Judd's reticent objects, it is widely agreed that art changed for ever in the 1960s. It changed so much that it became something else.  When I look at Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, the two layers of neatly arranged bricks that were once - it seems a long time ago - the most controversial thing in the Tate Collection, and at a painting by Caravaggio, I am seeing two categorically distinct things.  An artist 400 years ago would not have recognised Andre's bricks as art. But he would have had no problem at all recognising the logic that compels us to see bricks as art. The cult of the new was already in full swing in 1550, when Giorgio Vasari published The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vasari's history of the renaissance arrogantly and brutally praises the new and "modern" style he himself exemplifies as a painter, and has nothing but contempt for old styles - sneering at the gothic cathedrals we cherish, dismissing anyone in the least bit old-fashioned. So much of our own appetite for art that leaves the past behind is already there, in 1550, in Vasari.  We expect far less novelty from theatre, opera or literature than we do from art. In those fields, the revolutions of early 20th century modernism have long since receded, and it tends to be understood by both audience and artist that formal innovation will always, ultimately, serve the same narrative or dramatic ends that excited William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. In visual art alone, we assume that everything has changed utterly.  Rembrandt is an ironing board and the Mona Lisa has a moustache. A Bruce Nauman video installation a cat chasing a mouse around a nocturnal studio has no discernible relationship with Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne - or, for that matter, with Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon. Martin Creed's The Lights Going On and Off cannot easily be seen as having anything in common with Monet's Impression: Sunrise.  And yet the gulf that seems to exist between art before and after the 1960s is not as real as it looks. What we are actually dealing with is a specific instance of something far older and even unchanging - western culture's belief that visual art has an ability and obligation to provide it with new experiences and knowledge.  In 1992, Damien Hirst put a shark in a tank. It didn't seem that new. A great fish swimming through green liquid, mouth open, was recognised as a source of horror and the sublime long before Duchamp replaced art with philosophy. In John Singleton Copley's 18th century history painting Watson and the Shark, in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, a shark very like Hirst's opens its horrible maw and speeds through dark harbour waters towards a man who has fallen overboard. Fear, perverse excitement, the proximity of death: Copley's painting shares the same emotional curiosity as Hirst's vitrine.  The object that has come to deﬁne - especially for its detractors - art in our time is, in fact, timeless, archaic even. Hirst's shark could as easily ﬂoat in a mouldering cabinet of curiosities as in the Saatchi Gallery. It has the appeal of romantic art and gothic architecture. It is visceral, not cerebral; if it is an idea, it is a very primal idea, drenched in fear endorphins. All of Hirst's best art is like this - and he has been doing some of his best art recently. When you contemplate Adam and Eve Towards the End - his glassed-in world and hers, with male and female accoutrements, mirrors, soil, tobacco, all in a terrible mess - it is dread, not dry thought, that clutches you.  Romanticism is the most denigrated of aesthetic movements. Romantic art, we are warned, is hysterical, excessive, pompous, even fascistic. But romanticism includes Tchaikovsky as well as Wagner. Hirst is a romantic artist. But if you can talk about a contemporary artist as a romantic, or an expressionist, or even an ironist, then all our assumptions about a fundamental division between old and new, art before and after conceptualism, are nonsense.  In fact, what has changed are the rules we allow contemporary artists to work by. Once, the rules stipulated that an artist, to be recognised as new and, hence, important, must paint large-scale narratives - "histories" like Copley's painting of Watson and the Shark. Now, those rules associate the new and weighty with other things: video, performance. But really powerful and enduring art, whatever the rules happen to be, transcends them. Most 18th century paintings are historical curiosities, but Hogarth's March to Finchley explodes the conventions of history painting, just as Hirst's vitrines burst the confines minimalism. These works art mean something.  There was a lot of art around the world in the early 1990s of which this could be said. Rachel Whiteread and Felix Gonzales-Torres, Gerhard Richter and Lucian Freud, Bill Viola and Susan Hiller, Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois: the field was rich. All sorts of anxieties and releases made for an art that squared up to big themes - death, disease, memory - in serious, adult ways.  That moment has long since passed. For a decade now, artists have reverted the rules. The rules are defined by curators, by magazines, by critics, by talk. The rules are not creative.  Art can only become creative, can only become worthwhile, when it pushes past whatever regulatory system currently defines it, through a determination to encompass emotional life, social life, some kind of life.  In its very obsession with death, the art of a decade ago had life. But so much art is now possessed by a terminal self-regard.  There is so much style: paintings that are full of cute awareness of the silliness of painting; sculptures that can't get over the stupidity of making sculpture. There is performance art that re-enacts the history of performance art, artists who are curators and curators who think they are artists.  Usually, in the recent history of art, assumptions that have seemed permanent, the wave of the future, have proved reversible almost overnight. Style provokes counter-style. Renaissance generates Mannerism and Baroque gives birth to Rococo. In the micro-histories of art since the 1960s, such transformations have happened twice in a decade.  This time, nothing has happened. The vitality of art a decade ago has quite obviously dissipated. But nothing has taken its place: there is a mysterious stillness to the story of art, which seemed destined to eternal change. It is as if the rules have become so elastic, so sophisticated, they can encompass anything, so long as it has a sense of its own subordination to the larger picture, which is that galleries are cool places to be. So, instead of a strong reaction to the installations and casts and slowed films of decade ago, we have had a proliferation of weak reactions: jokey painting revivals, limp sculpture revivals, lo-ﬁ videos. It's all so half-hearted. And yet it all passes as interesting.  In the absence of exciting art, galleries are full of its mannered substitutes.  Somehow this doesn't seem matter, to judge by the popularity of modern art museums. It's as if we enjoy the experience of these places and occasions above and beyond the art that the excuse for them.  Meanwhile, for every person who visits the Frieze fair, there are 10 more who have nothing but foaming contempt for the whole business of contemporary art.
The world's great galleries are coming together for the Frieze Art Fair. Has Britain finally lost its reservations about contemporary art? By Jonathan Jones