It takes a gigantic exhibitionist ego and the skills of a first-rate salesman to be a successful Pop Artist. Look at Jeff Koons, for example. A former Wall Street trader and now Pop Artist extraordinaire, Koons is built up in Tate Modern’s new autumn show, Pop Life, into one of the most successful contemporary artists in the world.

There are several problems with this exhibition, one of which is its definition of success. Tate Modern seems to be promoting the measurement of art-world success by the prices achieved and gossip column inches secured by its superstars, by their ability to work the media machine and to play to audiences beyond the confines of the art world. If this really is art-world success, then Koons has it by the cartload. He has succeeded, possibly beyond his wildest dreams. I cannot help wondering whether Koons, when setting out to be an artist in his New York garret back in the 1980s, ever thought he would get away with an entire room at Tate Modern filled with billboard-sized colour photographs of himself, buffed, depilated and toned, engaged in hardcore, nothing-hidden sex with his porn-star wife.

But then, publicity, as we are told, is Koons’s medium. As a canny student of PR, he had an early hit, included in this show, with an outdoor billboard poster, Made in Heaven, commissioned by the Whitney Museum, which showed him lying naked on top of the skimpily dressed body of his co-star, the Hungarian-born porn star and Italian parliamentarian, Ilona Staller, aka La Cicciolina. He stares out at the camera at his adoring fans, while she lies back on a fake rock, a look of ecstasy, or possibly alarm, on her painted face. Casting himself as a top-ranking pop star, the work did no harm to Koons’s celestial self-image nor to his terrestrial bank account.

Pumped up by this success, his lust for more fame then led him to devise a wedding with La Cicciolina, which was consummated in the various pornographic photographs and kitschy sex sculptures we find in this show. This was just another doomed celebrity union; the pair were divorced within two years. But Hugh Hefner would love the art they made together. It has all the creepiness, the moistened tongues, dildos and penises, the faked orgasms, the stupendous vanity and desperation of pornographic magazines.

All this is Andy Warhol’s fault. Pop Life purports to examine the effects of Warhol’s legacy on the artists who came after him, riding on his shirt tails into the pages of the tabloids and gossip columns, into the publicity machine, into the marketplace and into life itself. The show begins with late Warhol, in all his forms, as publisher, TV producer, model, paparazzo, portraitist and maker of objects, promiscuously inserting himself into every available channel of mass marketing and popular entertainment.

Three rooms and 93 works are devoted to Warhol, which is a very large proportion of the whole exhibition, and this makes it feel unbalanced (the next largest body of works is by Koons, who has 15 pieces in the show), given that it is actually examining the work of the artists who came after him. Still, this imbalance probably reflects the Tate’s desire to show the large number of Warhol works received last year from the very generous Anthony d’Offay donation.

The other superstar who is being heavily promoted here on a par with Warhol and Koons is Takashi Murakami, the Japanese king of pop, whose work has spread from museums and galleries to art fairs, glossy magazines and beyond to the terra firma of retail. He has taken his exhibitions far beyond what Warhol did, in that he actually makes the cash registers ring in his shows. Incorporated in his © Murakami exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art LA last year, there was a fully operational Louis Vuitton shop selling handbags with his cute colourful logos.

Murakami has his own room at Tate Modern, crammed full with his signature cartoon sculptures, with videos that hector you in English and Japanese, a short movie directed by McG and starring Kirsten Dunst as a Japanese princess, a display cabinet showing a range of Murakamidesigned Louis Vuitton sneakers, lit from below like sacred objects, and generally lots of glitz and bling and noise. On entering it you feel a little like a tourist lost in the crowds on one of those hectically busy crossroads in Shibuya in Tokyo, bombarded with colours, lights, sounds and messages.

Included in it is one minor key nod to Japanese tradition, the circular tondo, White Out in Outer Space, which harks back to a series of circular paintings which Murakami, who has a PhD in Nihonga, did in homage to Ogata Korin, the 17th-century Japanese painter.

We also have a giant sculpture of Hiropon, the over-the-top 3-D fantasy woman of Japan’s otaku (manga-obsessed geeks) generation. She has a cartoonish face, a baroque blue tornado hairdo, gigantic breasts with sausage-like nipples from which spurt 3-D jets of milk, combining sweetness and perversion in a sculptural tour de force.

Warhol never moved as much merchandise as Murakami does. He is able to maintain audience credibility and sell his wares to kids at 7-Elevens in an edition of 50,000 figurines like the ones we might find in cereal packets, while flogging their big buxom sister, in an edition of three, to the curators who clamour for them. If the art world finds this difficult to swallow, the marketplace has had no trouble digesting his range.

Damien Hirst is of course here (how could we have such a cynical show without this king of cynicism?), represented with a room entitled Beautiful Inside My Head. This is the title of the auction he held at Sotheby’s a year ago, which raised, on the eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other financial behemoths, a record breaking £111.5 million. In Pop Life’s remarkably indigestible catalogue, Hirst’s self and work and ultimately this historic auction is raised to the level of a performance, a kind of social sculpture in which he managed to pedal glitzy new variations on familiar themes that he had worked on during the preceding two years.

If you missed the Sotheby’s preview, this is your chance to see that calf in formaldehyde, False Idol, the diamonds in a gold cabinet, Memories of/Moments with You, and The Kiss of Midas, which was another variation on a previously commercially successful theme, including butterflies, diamonds and gold paint.

Several of the artists represented here have set up shops as art works. In January 1993, unable to sell their art in galleries, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas set up a shop in the East End of London, where they flogged T-shirts, posters and assorted quirky bits and pieces, some of which are exhibited here. It was a studio-cum-salon-cum-flophouse, a studiously exhibitionist performance that closed shortly afterwards, when Emin burnt much of the remaining stock (the ashes are displayed in a small cardboard box).

Keith Haring’s room is also a re-creation of his shop, a black and white graffitied retail space that he opened in downtown New York in the 1980s, selling his T-shirts and mugs emblazoned with his signature characters, the barking dog and the radiant baby. Like Murakami’s LA show last year, Tate Modern will set the tills ringing in its show, with Haring designed T-shirts (£25), badges (£8) and patches (£4.50) on sale within his section of the exhibition.

The goods are sold as part of “an extended performance”, a diffusion range like the sunglasses and scents that Chanel or YSL produce to spread their label to the masses. But actually the diffusion range is nothing new among artists. Dalí plied his wares and himself across every facet of the media he could find, selling everything from Hitchcock films to brandy and scents.

There is a great deal of self-promotion going on among the artists in this show, several of whom choose to portray themselves graphically in porn spreads or porn videos. But there is also a danger of being terminally humourless. Wit and subversive life are evident in abundance in many of the works gathered here, even if one worries for their future in the harsher marketplace of posterity. The Haring shop is great fun, and the Koons a source of guaranteed amusement. But the show should come with a warning to young aspiring artists: you do not have to insinuate yourself into the gossip columns, make big bucks, remove all your clothes and inhibitions, make love in front of a video camera, or dress up as a brightly coloured felt flower (as Murakami did) in order to succeed.

Pop Life: Art in a Material World is at Tate Modern, SE1 (020-7887 8888), from Thurs to Jan 17

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