By Joshua Mack

As if art were tracking the US presidential race, this winter saw the apotheosis of an aesthetics of reduced means cobbled together from the flotsam and jetsam of America's consumer binge. Unmonumental, the first show at the new New Museum, brought together artists like Rachel Harrison, Mark Bradford and Matthew Monahan, while the Whitney Biennial is rife with younger figures pursuing a similar down at heels genre.

The inclusion of European and Latin American artists in Unmonumental indicates that this lo-fi style is not solely US based. But the phenomenon of a liberal elite embracing art that reflects the paucity endured by the majority of Americans whose decline in living standards mirrors the increase in fortune that now makes the carnival of the artworld possible – this seems like a truly Obama moment. The haves always know what's best for the have-nots.

Admittedly, there is poetic justice in the rising income some artists will earn selling the stuff of poverty to the rich. But from the other side, filling a home, or storage bin, with this material turns work that references other peoples' hardship into status symbols. It's an 'I feel your pain' thing up there with the Illinois senator calling working class people 'bitter'. It also recalls Hillary swigging boilermakers at an Indiana bar to make a point about her blue collar grit, even if the lady does genuinely likes a drink. The distance between such superficial empathy and real change remains as vast as the gulf between Clinton and Obama's platitudes about Iraq or universal health care, and realistic talk solutions.

After the shabby chic of Unmonumental and the Whitney Biennial, the spring now brings an efflorescence of big production aesthetics. Take the three massive Koons sculptures – a balloon dog, a heart and a piglet based on a colouring book – on the roof terrace at the Met, a setting that offers hard to beat views of our ritziest apartment houses and that masterpiece of public planning and landscape architecture, Central Park. Forget that Indiana boilermaker; $12 buys you a cocktail named after one of the three pieces on display. And why not have a couple? Koons' work exudes an opulence that seems to cancel out the sobering message on display a few blocks away at the Whitney, and the view is terrific if the sun's out. Besides which, what's a ten and two ones when the art costs twenty mil (Hanging Heart, $23.6 million, Sotheby's, 2007).

And no wonder this stuff's so expensive. Last weekend, the New York Times ran an article on Carlson & Company, the San Francisco based fabricators of these sculptures. Their feasibility study for the locomotive Koons is designing for LACMA ran to hundreds of pages and required input from Disney employees. The piece raises safety issues usually considered in the construction of amusement parks. In the 1990s, the cost overruns per unit of Koons' Celebration series, also made chez Carlson, approached those racked up by Pentagon weapons' programs. How appropriate, then, that Carlson subcontracts to firms that also serve California's aeronautic defense industry. At least the art market is helping job providers in that sector.

If Koons is the finicky master of high finish, Olafur Eliasson, subject of a retrospective now at MoMA and P.S.1, seems to be the gentle tinkerer. We see how he cobbles his work together from mirrors, lights and such like. The results can be as simple as a room bathed in a yellow light that reduces everything to duotone; a reflection in a mirror; or a table fan that’s now propelling itself around MoMA's cavernous atrium. The transparency of his methods and the subtlety of their affect seem to complement the artist's interest in viewer participation and active looking. He's even titled his show, Take your time, which plenty of people are doing knocking them back at the Met.

However, this apparent straightforwardness is deceptive. Eliasson realizes his installations with a crew of scientists, architects, and assistants known as the Studio Olafur Eliasson. Though the artist openly acknowledges his collaborators, the depressing message behind the realization of his work is that even simplicity has become a high budget affair.

Judging by the general feeling of blah that hangs over the Whitney Biennial compared with the gleeful crowds at the Met, work that suggests this remains the worlds' wealthiest nation – as the media claims ever more frequently – trumps the down and out. Although a bar and some sunshine sure help. Paradoxically, both aesthetic poles reflect parts of the whole that is America, just as the two parties and three candidates often appeal to wildly different segments of the populace. In the case of art, does any of this matter? Why shouldn't we be entertained if the worst that results is a plethora of vulgar baubles for the super rich or a vapid show in a museum. With politics, a bit more's on the line.
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Joshua Mack is a critic based in New York and a regular contributor to ArtReview magazine.