How delicious that Damien Hirst has cleaned up even as the media tell us that it’s all up for over-weaning capitalist thugs - his customers. What’s truly miraculous is that the art magnate and entrepreneur manages to come across as cheerfully demotic and populist as he rakes in the lucre. What we sense, of course, is that Hirst’s work is an essay in shock-value. He plays games with what offends us and the value we will place on things. Skulls and diamonds, and stuffed calves and gold leaf, are the ideal art objects for a period of capitalist hiatus. These bad times are perfect times for Hirst’s art and its value. Read more ›

It’s striking how often any thing grim about social life in Victoria’s reign is called “dickensian”. That was the word Michael Holroyd used to describe the actor Henry Irving’s “drudgery” as a clerk in his early days. (This was in a doubtless fabulous work on the actor by Britain’s greatest literary biographer, just published.) Actually, what was more striking was Holroyd’s evidence of a rather joyful dickensian entrepreneurship. Read more ›