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No Moore petty nationalism … Jackson Pollock, seen here in his studio in 1949, was in the vanguard of 20th-century modernism. Photograph: Martha Holmes/AP

London used to be cool. Artists and pop stars and fashion geniuses by the score. But that was yesterday. Art and pop have a new place to party. It's called New York.

A startling new hybrid of art and popular culture is exploding in and around Manhattan. As Lady Gaga collaborates with artists on her new Artpop project, and Marina Abramovic dances with Jay-Z, art has merged with mass entertainment in the US this summer.

We've covered that. What's more interesting is that all this is centred on New York, putting the art capital of the 20th century back where it belongs and leaving royal metropolises looking to their art laurels.

King of the hill. Top of the heap.

The new mix of high and low coming out of New York recalls the city's energy in the 1980s, when graffiti artists went clubbing with Andy Warhol, or the 1960s, when The Velvet Underground took pop art to eerie heights. And it proves yet again that the US is the land of modernity, with New York its cultural capital.

Why is this? It's basic history. The US was the first modern democracy, and after the civil war it experienced a colossal industrial takeoff. By 1900 it was building skyscrapers.

Early modernism in the arts was most advanced in Old Europe – Paris and Vienna, St Petersburg and Dublin – but it found a natural home in the US. Ever since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in New York in 1917, it has been among skyscrapers that modern art really fitted in.

To see a Mark Rothko painting at New York's Museum of Modern Art and then walk the streets outside is to experience a perfect match of art and life.

As Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell saw, just to collect the trash on the sidewalk in New York is to find fabulous stories of the modern world. Migrants and millionaires, wonders and horrors dot the grid of Manhattan like the pulses of energy in Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

I shun the petty nationalism that makes British galleries pretend Henry Moore is the equal of Jackson Pollock. The greatest art of the modern world belongs to New York. The art of this century is finding its way home.

Title:
New York, New York … still the capital of art world cool