It was, to those of a certain sensibility, a depressing nadir in the history of art: the day when Banksy, the Bristol-based graffiti artist, responded to a sale of his works at Sotheby’s by posting an image on his own website. It showed an auction room crowded with collectors bidding for a painting showing nothing but the words: “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit” (pictured above).

Needless to say, the image was turned into a print and sold at subsequent auctions. And why wouldn’t it? Here was the moment when the hyper-inflated contemporary art market finally turned in on itself; when the lines between the statement of the artist, the commodification of his work and the compliance of his audience became so irrevocably blurred that no one could make sense of it any more.

As a joke, Banksy’s satirical swipe was passably funny. But it was also complicated: who, exactly, was the swipe aimed against? Were the “morons” the collectors who were, before last year’s financial meltdown, making a killing in a rapidly rising market? Or an art establishment that, in its lust for novelty, seemed incapable of determining whether an artist’s motives were honest or cynical, or whether it simply didn’t matter any more?

Those uncomfortable questions are traditionally avoided by the art world at large, which has a vested interest in drawing a veil of mystery over its occasionally puzzling workings. It is unfashionable to attempt to explain, in the contemporary art world, why a particular work is actually any good. The issue is too fraught with layers of irony, self-referentiality and knowingness.

But an exhibition at Tate Modern next month, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, will at least try to look at the subject of art and money in a dispassionate way. Styling itself as a “rereading of one of the major legacies of pop art”, it will look at some of contemporary art’s greatest (and richest) superstars – Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami – and the way in which they have exploited the spheres of marketing, branding, publicity and celebrity to add allure to their work.

It promises to be a brave and provocative show. The story is not an easy one to disentangle, any more than Banksy’s intentions were when he posted his mocking response to commercial success.

One popular and traditional reaction – that all these artists’ work is part of a cynical money-making strategy that a confused and aesthetically demoralised public has fallen for – is surely too simple. It is an artist’s job to interpret the world but he or she must also live inside it. If that world is marked by fluidity, ambiguity, uncertainty – the tenets of the so-called postmodern condition – how can art stand aside?

The show begins, as it must, with Andy Warhol, whose signature style as an artist has dominated the art of the postwar era. Warhol’s manipulation of his own image – “you should always have a product that’s not you” – his affected “look”, his creation of a celebrity “factory”, have all found echoes in today’s artistic practice.

Like any innovative artist, Warhol was himself partly reacting to a prevailing climate: the earnest and emotionally heated world of the abstract expressionists. When its champion Jackson Pollock was featured in a 1949 Life Magazine picture spread, and later became the subject of a filmed documentary by Hans Namuth, the subsequent celebrity sent him into a spiral of renewed depression. Pollock felt that the exposure of his working methods had stripped away part of his mystique as an artist.

It was the acme, as Tate’s assistant curator Nick Cullinan puts it, of the period of the “heartfelt gesture, the image of the brooding, pensive genius at work”. Warhol turned that image on its head. “Rather than the bohemian outsider, he became an infiltrator and decided to grapple with modern life in its own terms,” says Cullinan. Warhol’s fame, rather than an embarrassment, became a principal theme of Warhol’s art.

This radical move gives the forthcoming show its intellectual ballast. The post-Warhol era became the ultimate repudiation of the Romantic idea – to which we are still absurdly wedded – of the lone artist battling pennilessly outside the system to provide transcendent observations on a world in which he will never play a part.

Rather than see this as art’s sell-out, says Cullinan, it is more of a move back towards the practice of Renaissance workshops, which discouraged the cult of the individual, and emphasised detached, precise craftsmanship above all else. “In some ways we have come full circle,” he says. The Romantic idea is a very modern invention. But tortured genius is old hat.”

Takashi Murakami’s ‘White Out in Outer Space’ (2009)

Nowhere better exemplifies the idea of the “new workshop” than the New York studio of Takashi Murakami’s art production company Kaikai Kiki, formed by the Japanese artist to supervise the licensing and merchandising activities that have made him one of the most fashionable and richly-rewarded artists of his time.

I visited the workshop with Cullinan in the spring and found, rather than the rambunctious atmosphere we associate with the production of art, a cool, efficient air akin to that of a machine-tools manufacturing plant. The 20-odd staff, who produce between 20 and 70 works each year that will sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds each, work scrupulously and silently on pieces that have been designed by the artist in his native Tokyo.

Murakami is known for his “superflat” paintings, a term that describes not only their plastic, highly finished surfaces but also the artist’s philosophy, which attempts to abolish distinctions between high and low cultures, and between “fine” and commercial art.

In 2002, Murakami, who holds a PhD in traditional Japanese painting, started to collaborate with the luxury goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton, producing a range of luggage designs that provided playful variations of the company’s logo, and that has been spectacularly successful (the bags grossed more than $300m in their first full year of production).

We were shown around the workshop by studio manager Jeff Vreeland, who stresses, as if it were needed, the quality control exercised by the artist. The paintings that stand on the studio walls are “temporarily finished”, he says, awaiting final approval from Murakami on one of his visits to New York. “Takashi has an amazing eye. If something is not right he can tell right away. He is never wrong, If he asks for a remake, it always looks better.” Staff are instructed not to throw anything away, not even doodles, and to conserve all the paintbrushes used in the work (Murakami believes each one has its own soul, explains Vreeland).

Murakami’s refusal to acknowledge the hierarchies of art and his unashamed eagerness to exploit commercial opportunities – both of which are shared by Jeff Koons – is, according to both artists’ supporters, a refreshing counter to western avant-garde art’s disdain for mass culture. This is a central theme of Pop Life: the breakdown of barriers and the importance of art’s new-found accessibility (to which Tate Modern itself is a notable temple).

Is it just happy coincidence that such noble intentions have made multi-millionaires out of the likes of Koons, Murakami and Hirst, I ask Cullinan? He points to other artists, such as the performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, also featured in the show, whose radical infiltration of the pornography industry singularly failed to set any cash registers ringing.

Jeff Koons’ ‘Rabbit’ (1986)

Koons will be represented in the exhibition by his infamous “Made In Heaven” works, sexually explicit photographs that celebrated his love affair with Ilona Staller, aka la Cicciolina, in the early 1990s. Koons’s work is widely derided for its obsession with kitsch and pastiche but the artist himself denies the charges, insisting that the work is as heartfelt and honest as Pollock’s febrile drippings all those years ago.

“I can’t possibly believe that Koons’s work is sincere – but he does,” says Cullinan. “It makes you rethink a lot of your prejudices. Either way, it is very compelling, and brings the whole notion of sincerity and intentionality into play.” And if it is all just a performance? “Then he deserves an Oscar.”

So Pop Life is a show that refreshingly aims to question some of the most widely held assumptions behind the contemporary art world – including those, admits Cullinan, behind the very idea of curation itself. “Normally as a curator you try to put on the very best-looking exhibition that you can but that would be a failure here,” he says. “We need to provoke a discussion on how the goalposts have shifted, and what the modern artist represents.”

I thought of those words as I walked around the Los Angeles County Museum of Art earlier this week, and spotted that Koons’s “Michael Jackson and Bubbles”, the artist’s 1988 sculpture of the singer and his pet chimp, was surrounded by a safety cordon. Part of the piece, I asked a curator? No, she said. It seems that since Jackson’s death, people have been getting ever closer to the work, wanting to touch it, and needed to be kept away.

One man’s outsize kitsch figurine, it seems, is another’s sacred shrine. That’s pop life for you.

‘Pop Life: Art in a Material World’ runs from October 1-January 17 2010 at Tate Modern, London. www.tate.org.uk/modern

‘Jeff Koons: PopEye Series’ closes on Sunday at the Serpentine Gallery, London www.serpentinegallery.org

‘Takashi Murakami Paints Self-Portraits’ runs from September 15-October 17 at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris www.galerieperrotin.com

Peter Aspden is the FT’s arts writer