Jean-Marc Bustamante has no doubt where the power lies in French art, and that is with Marcel Duchamp. A loping fifty-four-year-old, he ponders the problem with a good-natured frown. “The trouble is, French artists – César, Bertrand Lavier and the rest – they went for the Duchamp of the readymade,” broods Bustamante, in London for a show of his latest work at the Timothy Taylor Gallery. “Not Duchamp the alchemist, Duchamp the surrealist, Duchamp the magicien. In America, Robert Gober and Paul McCarthy, they are fascinated by the difficult Duchamp, the one who went to Pasadena. But today, the French can’t cope with this kind of baroquisme. French art has become obsessed with ideas. They don’t like painting, they don’t like trash.”

Bustamante knows what he’s talking about. He is currently in the throes of curating his third and final Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, a visual arts festival that, under his tenure, has become noticeably riskier and more outward looking. Printemps 2006 includes the first ever showing in France of Sarah Lucas’s work, for example – her particularly impolite Complete Arsehole series. If you take Bustamante’s two-Duchamps line, then Lucas falls heavily into the Gober camp.This isn’t cérébrale art and, Printemps’ curator maintains, it’s the kind of art that couldn’t be made in France today.

Young French artists have no fire in their belly, he says, and it is because the creaking cultural panoply of the French state – the FRACs and CNAPs – have spoilt them.With guaranteed studio space, five years’ free tuition and endless regional galleries to snap up their work, French art students are lazy. “You only had to go to La force de l’art [a show of contemporary French art at the Grand Palais this May] to see what I mean,” shrugs Bustamante. “Everyone included, every artist given the same amount of space; égalité in precisely the wrong sense. I’m French, I like the idea of the cultural exception; but…”.

Teaching as he does at the École des Beaux Arts, Bustamante has seen the French art world from three sides. (“Until Printemps, I thought I was a difficult artist,” he beams, ruefully. “Now I’ve been a curator, I’m not so sure.”) His view at the end of all this is that power in French art lies increasingly with the grandes marquises: the owners of big-name fashion and luxury goods brands like François Pinault and agnès b.

“With globalisation, the art scene has changed a lot, even in France,” Bustamante says. “Critics and dealers are a bit lost – where is the good art? China? Which art can we believe in now? Before, taste was determined by the closed world of the state. Now that world is not so secure.” Into this breach have stepped enormously rich collectors like Pinault, used to global markets and international brand making. The result has been an overlap between fashion and art that Bustamante sees as deeply destructive.

“When you look at Pinault’s collection, it’s not really his,” he says. “He has people advising him, buying for him – it’s all to do with fashion. What happened was that about five years ago, Emmanuel Perrotin [owner of the Paris gallery of that name] decided to deal with Pinault and that kind of client. Before, if you went to openings at Paris galleries, they were full of sad, ugly people. Now it’s all beautiful boys, beautiful girls. These days, it’s no longer a problem if you go to Papa and say, ‘I want to go to art school’ – it’s seen as a high-earning career, like banking. But serious artists – good artists among my students – they are in real trouble.”

So where does French art go from here? Bustamante shrugs. “It’s difficult. Artists have to be charming, seductive, effective and good. People seem to have forgotten about the last of these.” He pauses for a minute, then says: “There’s a growing pressure now on young artists to succeed straight away. Up until now, the artist’s career has been very long. Now, with all this fashion and zapping, maybe that will change. It could be that an artist will now have a professional life of five or ten years. I hope not, eh? I mean, I’m fifty-four and I want to go on working.”