A black T-shirt with an image of Damien Hirst’s notorious platinum skull set with 8,601 flawless diamonds has become something of an art-world uniform this summer. Collectors and dealers could be spotted in it all over Venice earlier this month during the preview days of the Biennale. Visitors wore it last week at Art Basel, the annual contemporary art fair in Switzerland, and it is turning up in London as well.

He’s not really a big deal in LA. He just opened a show here recently, and it got a bit of obligatory coverage, but it has zero “LA Art World” buzz, at least as far as my ears are concerned. I have no idea what his sales are like here, but I imagine he’s doing well enough – art buying at the top of the market seems to be 50% crazy passion and 50% need to fit in, which guarantees a lifelong income to any hack to get the kind of attention Hirst has had. Really, the whole YBA thing didn’t really have much of an impact on Los Angeles. Their names don’t really drop much here, at least not in my circles.

I don’t think the American art establishment, especially the curatorial and art writing establishment, really goes in much for “shock art” anyways. I really think we have a much healthier intellectualism here in America – it’s tempered by both our “Wild West Individualism” and strong anti-intellectual streak.

All of that being said, I don’t necessarily dislike his art. He’s done some stuff that’s got strong aesthetics, and had he taken a more hedonistic and elitist position on “For the Love of God”, I might have loved it. As it is now, I see it as a little dickless. I can’t really see his (or anyone else’s) work being worth the money people are paying for it, but I don’t have tens of millions laying about to really understand the motivation behind the economics of the art world.

I tend to interpret British Art through a particular lens. I view British rock in the same vein – how hard can it be to get noticed in a country where the population and media is so centralized? A band or artist in Britain can get exposure across the whole geography of the country very quickly, and then make the immediate jump to international exposure.

In America, artists and musicians have to do way more work to rise to the top, and the environment is a dozen times more competitive. Add to that the almost total lack of government support for the arts at home, and you’ve got a much more Darwinian environment than most European countries have. I’ve just managed to vastly oversimplify my theory on the prominence of British art and music, but that’s the general idea.

The stuff at the SF gallery sounds positively pathetic. Is he as big a deal in America? I like to imagine he’s like Kylie Minogue– super massive over here but a nobody in the US. I’m wrong about this though, aren’t I?

Uh, right, Damien – not these 50 million dollar art turds.

In my last trip to SF, I peeked into his SF gallery and there were a bunch of large skull prints on view, as well as some pill stuff, what looked like a community college-level cast skull piece, and some kind of print that was a commentary/diagram on nuclear capable states that had its facts wrong. It was like a gift shop for people with meaningless lives and too much money to spend.

I just read this on Art News: “an eight-inch-long plastic skull covered with bright enamel, spin-art style, is £25,000 in an edition of 20. Three different silkscreen prints of the skull, shown in three-quarter view and measuring ca. 40 x 30 in. — and sprinkled with diamond dust — are £10,000 each in editions of 250. Moving towards the bargain basement, a silkscreen print of the skull measuring about 13 x 10 in., published in an edition of 2,000, is priced at £900. And several different posters for Hirst’s exhibition, picturing the diamond-covered skull, are £30 each, as are several t-shirts imprinted with his skull image. Many of the editions become available on July 7, 2007.”

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD souviner shop. Death disco ball tat, all of it.