For better or worse, the sputtering art market is losing the power to confer prestige – a painting’s aesthetic worth is no longer set at auction. The Marlene Dumas exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, however, springs from that oh-so-recent time when quality could be expressed in currency: her painting, “The Visitor,” sold for £3.1m at Sotheby’s last July, making Dumas the most expensive living female artist. It’s already time to reappraise. At MoMA, in galleries filled with painted bodies – dead, tortured or writhing in simulated ecstasy – I overheard one insider confide to another that he hoped the economic slump might sweep away all the glitter that has clung to the Dumas brand and reveal her as the great virtuoso she had always been. I was thinking along similar lines but came to a different conclusion. I imagine that once Dumas loses her quantifiable status, she will fade into the nether reaches of art history, a curiosity of the crazy boom years.

Spread over two floors, the show tracks the non-development of an artist who discovered both her style and her subjects early on and then continued to plumb their shallows over ensuing decades. Rather than organise the show chronologically, which would have thrown the poverty of Dumas’ imagination into relief, curator Connie Butler cleverly installed the work by theme. The reality seeps through all the same. Although Dumas tackles the immortal subjects – death, life, bodies and politics – she swathes them in murk, smudging out specificity and seeking a broader profundity that never materialises.