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
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…
