Do Damien Hirst's dots really matter?

Is a Damien Hirst spot painting worth the fuss, planning and bother of stealing it from an art gallery?

The taking of two of these dotty works from a Notting Hill gallery is being treated as a big national news story, almost like the theft of a Rembrandt or a Picasso. But even if you find Hirst's series of paintings with grids of multicoloured circles on a white background attractive, they occupy a very small place in the history of art. In the great adventure that was 20th-century abstraction, the arrival of these coolly planned and professionally executed paintings near the century's end was a cynical epilogue that replaced the tragic visions of a Rothkowith self-mocking sitcom farce.

Art theft has a way of elevating what it steals, because we miss what is not there. The Mona Lisa became even more famous after it was stolen and then recovered in the early 20th century. But surely we're not going to decide that because Hirst's art is earmarked for a heist, he must be a great artist.

Abstract art is one of the greatest achievements of the modern world. It is a mighty paradox, the mind-bending artistic equivalent of quantum physics. Rationally, a coloured daub with no figures or landscape, nothing to identify and interpret, ought to be meaningless: a decoration at best. This was the Victorian critic John Ruskin's nightmare when he denounced Whistler's Falling Rocket with its abstract wisps of colour as a pot of paint flung in the face of the public.

Yet in the 20th century, abstraction became the most serious and profound realm of modern art. It is not easy to put into words what Mondrian does when he slides together black lines and coloured rectangles in his cosmic game of shapes. It is however impossible to ignore the sense of order and conviction and significance his paintings hold. The same goes for Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist or Rothko's Tate Modern murals.

No art is more meaningful and passionate than abstraction at its best – but, by the end of the 20th century, it had become a cliche. The modernist claim of sublime authority for the likes of Barnett Newman was mocked by postmodernists. Hirst enlivened an exhausted art world with parodic "modern paintings" that beg to be enjoyed ironically. They are paintings to show off at cocktail parties; paintings to decorate PR company offices: paintings to snort coke in front of.

There is, or was, an exhilaration to their brittle mood of ecstasy and hysteria. But it leads nowhere: not to insight, not to imagination, not the mysterious power of true abstract art.

In the Danish television series Borgen, a political conference is held at a venue decorated with Hirst's paintings. We are clearly meant to deduce the party holding the conference has sold out. That's what Hirst has become – the international symbol for all that is heartless and pretentious.

Hirst's spot paintings are icons of superficiality for a superficial age. In that sense, they are contemporary classics. But I wouldn't cross the road to nick one.