Damien Hirst
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
She’s pop’s Damien Hirst: Beyoncé’s Renaissance reviewed
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…
Pharmacy 2 makes me like Damien Hirst
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:…
Poetic or pretentious? Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust at the Royal Academy reviewed
Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question…
Max Hastings’s diary: The joys of middle age, and Prince Charles’s strange letters
I am living in rustic seclusion while writing a book. Our only cultural outing of the week was to Newbury…
Drink, drugs and dressing-up: behind the scenes of the fashion industry
Philip Hensher explores a dangerously intoxicating world, and discovers just how quickly famous designers can become an irrelevance
Frieze Art Fair: where great refinement meets harrowing vulgarity
If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…
Is John Hoyland the new Turner?
What happens to an artist’s reputation when he dies? Traditionally, there was a period of cooling off when the reputation,…
When Francis Davison made me judge — and burn — his art
In 1983, Damien Hirst saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of the collages of Francis Davison which ‘blew him…
