There seems to always be faction that is trying to open art up to the world, and a faction that just wants Art for Art's sake. What has declined in my experience is the presence of politically minded artists. However, in the field of written art, or literature as it is more commonly known in the universities, I am an expert, even a master. My own work directly engages issues of existence within society, sometimes every possible issue at once, other times going very deep into one particular issue, like racism or political corruption or shopping. The one exception to this rule is the excellent novelist Walter Farragut, from Cleveland, whose most recent book, Slipping Into Darkness , made me cry, and also made me jealous.
Art has it's own set of issues.
An artist still needs to be able to push the viewer into a different mind pattern, that's when a work becomes successful and culturally and socially relevant. That is not to say contemporary art does not reflect political ideologies. It is not in the mainstream, but it has a profoundly subversive way of shaping it. Well, since I've accidentally decided not to go out much, my answers are based on what I see in Frieze. I can only say that art being made by young British people today seems to fairly engaged in society of a sort.