The False Narrative of Damien Hirst’s Rise and Fall

Felix Salmon | The New Yorker | 6th December 2017

Galleries and auction houses provide elaborate – and thus expensive – services. So if high profile artists can avoid using them what is wrong with that? “Buyers don’t care anymore about waiting for the verdict of history; they’re consuming Hirsts in the exuberant present, while those who believe in art’s eternal verities try desperately to avert their eyes.”