Damien Hirst

In the face of so much change, it’s pleasing to the senses to wander into a church and find it still intact after over a thousand years. At least some places were built to last. Lurking behind the dust-mote beams in St Bartholomew the Great, in the south transept of the Square Mile’s extraordinary priory […]

I’ve always returned to London because it was just so damned different to everywhere else, but when I walked into Leicester Square yesterday and saw that the entire centre garden had been swallowed up by something called ‘the Disney Cinderella Experience’ my heart sank. First, it’s that word ‘experience’, tacked onto everything. Then there’s the […]

I took a stroll down to the Tate Modern yesterday and caught a double art bill for a quick bit of Compare & Contrast… The (invisible) elephant in the room at the Edvard Munch show was the absence of ‘The Scream’, and yet in many ways it’s already there in so many of his later […]

When it’s not actually art at all, according to Julian Spalding, the head of some of Britain’s top public galleries. He reckons the bubble will soon burst for zillionaire Damien Hirst and other “con artists” – that’s “conceptual artists”, the art of ideas wherein you think of something and pay someone else to create it […]