The Isle of the Dead, 1880, by Arnold Böcklin. Photograph: Bridgeman Art Library
You cannot be interested simultaneously in the art of past and present. The art of today is so wildly and utterly different from any art that has gone before, and young people brought up with it so ignorant of the past, that there is really no connection between the kind of art you see in the National Gallery or the Louvre and the kind you see in cutting-edge galleries.
This is the tedious cliché that seems to suit champions and enemies of new art alike. For new art's enemies, it is necessarily dumb, insensitive, ahistorical. For many of its fans, it is also those things - a cultural form they like to think has more in common with clubbing than with contemplating Old Masters.
This is rubbish. Artists today are just as inspired by the image bank of the past as they have always been. Any serious art is a dialogue with predecessors. So, let's take a look around the London galleries. Go to Haunch of Venison in the West End where a show by Mat Collishaw has just opened and the first thing you see is ... a digital recreation of Arnold Böcklin's 19th century Symbolist painting The Isle of the Dead. Collishaw made a model of the eerie Mediterranean island in Böcklin's painting, photographed it, then modelled the way shadows might swarm it during a 24-hour period.
Böcklin's macabre deathly classical vision has haunted the modern mind, for good and ill. Sigmund Freud dreamt about this painting of a cemetery isle brooding over a black sea - he reveals in his book The Interpretation of Dreams - and Adolf Hitler revered it. Salvador Dalí's rocky landscapes quote it. There is even a horror film starring Boris Karloff called Isle of the Dead that is set on Böcklin's nightmare island. Now Collishaw revisits it, just as in Tom Friedman's show that has just closed at Gagosian, styrofoam monsters referred inescapably to the hybrid monstrous fruit and vegetable creations of the 16th century artist Arcimboldo.
You don't have to know anything about Böcklin or Arcimboldo to enjoy these artists - but it will enrich your pleasure. They apparently find as much inspiration in museums, or at least art books, as in watching TV. Nor will it do to take a lofty snobbish line and see their quotations as superficial. Collishaw's use of Böcklin is strange and powerful. Art moves endlessly forward, but keeps one eye facing back.
