Damien Hirst
Who’s still flying the flag for Britpop?
Alex James’s embrace of the term distinguishes him from his contemporaries. Miranda Sawyer reminds us of how much of the best 1990s music fell outside Britpop’s retromania
The joy of hanging out with artists
Lynn Barber finds painters and sculptors easily the most congenial people to interview - despite having received a death threat from the Chapman brothers
The hellraisers of Hoxton: Art, by Peter Carty, reviewed
The pretensions of the Young British Artists are lampooned in Carty’s debut novel – but there’s still something irresistible about the 1990s London it recreates
Queen B
You feel a little sorry for Renaissance, the first solo album by Beyoncé in more than six years. It just…
Is the bubble about to burst in the absurdly inflated contemporary art market?
I always suspected I disliked Jeff Koons, until I saw one of his monumental pieces at Frieze London a few…
Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
Easy to swallow
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
M.C. Escher: limited, repetitive, but he deserves a place in art history
‘Surely,’ mused the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, ‘it is a bit absurd to draw a few lines and then claim:…
Thinking inside the box
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
Diary
I am living in rustic seclusion while writing a book. Our only cultural outing of the week was to Newbury…
Bad boys of fashion
Philip Hensher explores a dangerously intoxicating world, and discovers just how quickly famous designers can become an irrelevance
The price test
If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…
The new Turner?
What happens to an artist’s reputation when he dies? Traditionally, there was a period of cooling off when the reputation,…
Images that glow in the mind
In 1983, Damien Hirst saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of the collages of Francis Davison which ‘blew him…
