We have got so used to watching the prices of paintings soaring through the stratosphere that we seem to have forgotten that, in reality, the art world moves rather more like a car driven by a little old lady than like a space rocket.

It warms up slowly, roaring loudly before leaping forward in a mad, revving lurch. Then, suddenly but predictably, it stalls.

And it’s no bad thing to sit still and stare at the financial landscape for a bit. Everything has got out of kilter. The current market correction can only be good in the long term for our art world.

It certainly is for the serious longstanding collectors – including public institutions – who, priced out of the market, have been waiting for some time now for sale figures to tumble from their competitive peaks. It is rumoured that prices will fall over the next year by as much as 50 per cent from current estimates. You may think that the dealers will be biting their nails in their swanky white cubes, but this is an opportunity for them and the primary market – increasingly eclipsed in recent years by the auction houses – to reclaim their power.

When an art work is not simply treated like the equivalent of a stock market stake, the dealer with commitment and conviction can find his proper role.

There may be plenty of newly fashionable artists frothing with worry in their slick East End warehouses, remembering how the 1991 crash wiped such figures as Julian Schnabel off the map temporarily. But for the art-loving public this is an important moment of reckoning.

The next few months will start to show us which figures will stand the test of time: who are the real innovators and who the formulaic copyists. Plenty will fall casualty to the whims of the very fashions they forged or followed so assiduously.

This is how the history of art gets written. The story of culture is not compiled by auction house figures but by creative individuals working alone and often in the most testing of financial circumstances. Things at the creative end are certainly starting to rev up.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette