I'll allow how his (Hirst's) earlier work had some verve and intelligence.

I'm fascinated by how the art market pushes someone like that, at what point does ambition spill over into crass greed and contempt.

I've never worked in the commercial sector, though obviously, many of the artists I worked with at the YSP and Cartwright Hall were signed to galleries and some (like Moore, Caro, Frink etc.) to the big players. In that limited experience, it struck me that there were three types of agent/gallery.

The first was the - generally regionally-based - agent or gallery owner who worked their socks off for their artists and scraped a living by working every hour god sent.  Often artists themselves. The second was the off-Cork Street London gallery which generally ran at a loss and were the playthings of extremely wealthy owners who enjoyed rubbing up (sometimes literally) against youth and creativity.

The third type were the big boys - the Cork St & New Bond St. galleries which didn't give a shit about art & creativity and would just have happily sold assault rifles if they could get the same margin on them. Those galleries generally marked-up at comfortably over 100%, so they could make huge amounts from a sell-out show. What they wanted was sensation and stylistic ossification.

Hirst is their wet dream, with his factory churning out series of identical or near-identical works that look great on a big white wall, and his (still reasonably frequent) canny sensational interventions, which keep him in the headlines and in the minds of the people who dress oligarchs' homes.

Which I think is part of the issue raised when I managed to subvert this thread from its perfectly decent original purpose. The quality of Damien Hirst's work is open to debate, but his response to Cartrain indicates that irrespective of the that, he has some vile attitudes going on.

Curious how these ethical debates centre on writers, film-makers, painters, sculptors, musicians, whatever Damien Hirst is etc. We don't have quite the same concerns about houses, clothes, roads, food, trains and so on. If the pavement from my house to the shops was recently resurfaced by one of the most miserable bastards who ever lived, I don't think I'd consider another route, or worry too much about it. There are issues that are superficially similar e.g. avoiding clothes and shoes made by child workers on poverty wages, but the considerations are different.

You're right that we don't apply the same criterion to other pieces of work: perhaps it has to do with the romantic notion that when we buy a work of art, we are buying a little piece of the maker's soul. If other aspects of that soul are corrupt, maybe the creative product and the transaction are tainted, too?

Buying art is elective, personal and intimate. Maybe a better comparison is with politics and organised religion where we do subscribe with passion & conviction: and we also exert a similar judgmentalism when confronted with the moral fallibility of priests and politicians. Though even that is not a true comparison because career politicians and professional faith leaders trade to a great extent on their probity, whereas artists are expected, if anything, to be a bit wayward & louche.
 

"career politicians and professional faith leaders trade to a great extent on their probity"

 :-|

I wonder if any of these nasty people had anticipated Google and Twitter, they would have not done some things.

apparent probity, I should have said...