All filler, precious little killer

Something hilarious is happening to the British art scene. As it turns out, Damien Hirst, arguably the richest and by that standard most "successful" artist who ever lived, cannot paint. Many, many people cannot paint, I happen to be one of them, but then all of us non-painters have not managed to hypnotize the world's high-art culture with our every move. Even if you think you've never heard of Hirst, you have. He's famous for taking the classic "ready-made" or "found object" concept to its extreme. How about his diamond-encrusted human skull? Or his pharmacy in the Tate Gallery, calling it - wait for it - "Pharmacy." I suppose spectators were expected to like consider the fact that like pharmaceuticals were like super prominent in our lives and stuff. By no means a lazy man, Hirst has produced innumerable similar installations, entire series of preserved animals, including his famous tiger shark which he blithely called "The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living." If he had asked for my help in naming the work I would have offered, "What's it called at the museum?" or "Preliminary remarks toward obtaining a refund."

One of Hirst's most celebrated approaches to art is his tongue-in-cheek take on the whole concept of artist's apprentice. Skinny dipping in the contemporary shallows, he literally phoned in his instructions to a team of fledgling artists who then painted according to his specifications. How these conversations went I can only imagine: "Well just splatter some color in the middle, yeah, then add the butterflies. There's got to be so many butterflies. It's a fucking butterfly party, yeah." Now, in his early 40s, the mighty artist has decided to crank it up a notch by actually painting something himself. And what this man has painted is crap. It would seem that the emperor of contemporary art is not only without his silken, one-of-a-kind embroidered robes, but is in fact wearing little more than natty, poop-streaked nut huggers.

True, so true. But what of more ordinary expressions of vacuous self-promotion? Recently, I found myself surrounded by a great herd of folk notable for their evident relative financial prosperity. Expensive clothes and lifestyles abounded, were on display and though no particular runway commanded attention, it was indeed a fashion show. Nothing wrong with that necessarily. It's nice to look nice. But as I floated among the currents at their impressively shoe-ed feet, it seemed obvious to me that very fine rules and regulations were being followed. It was not so much expressing wealth to standout, but expressing wealth to fit it. I thought that having money enabled more and better opportunities to locate and express one's individuality. Not so, like columns of soldiers the well-dressed wealthy displayed their matching uniforms. "Do these people collect Damien Hirst?" I didn't ask but now insinuate that I had.

To the dictionary: Pretension - 'Act of claiming or alleging.' Though by different means, both Hirst and these expensively dressed folk achieve a high level of pretension. They claim and allege that what they do and what they have stands as extremely significant, one for the ages, a monument to their ascendancy to the top of pile. When Hirst says, "Look at my fucking butterflies," I hear him alleging, "Everything's crap, but have you seen these choice turds I'm selling?" And when people with large quantities of expendable income (or savings) strut around in expensive clothing, exuding an attitude of "How does the world turn without knowledge of my wardrobe?" I think to my self, "How does the world turn so heavily laden with such idiotic twittishness?" To some it might make sense to value a person based on the clothes he happened to have noticed and purchased, but brand-name labels should not be given the same cultural value as literary works. As the blooming revelation of Hirst's mediocrity teaches us, you can fake it until you make it, but when you make it don't forget that you're also faking it.