Hirst mania!

There's all sorts of chatter on the Damien Hirst front. No surprise that some of the best and brightest in the art world are not impressed by the sharkmaster's Sotheby's sale, which starts tonight. The joy, of course, isn't what these naysayers are saying, it's how they say it. Richard Lacayo has a wonderful summation of Hirst's career as threatening to "boil down to a kernel of genuine invention surrounded by a vast penumbra of middling merchandise." Carol Vogel plays it pretty straight, and includes some chatter with the man himself. “If you’re going to do it,” Hirst tells her, “do it big. It’s nice not to play safe.” (Easy for him to say... he's stinkin' rich.) Robert Hughes has had just about enough:

The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.