A response to Damien Hirst in The Sunday Times Magazine, UK

I for one don’t particularly like Warhol and find some of the work disingenuous, but mainly it leaves me cold. Hirst said a Warhol painting is a sculpture, that it’s not a painting but rather all about the image. However, it’s not a painting or a sculpture but a conceptual, intellectual idea of a painting constructed (rather than made in the traditional sense) using existing, extrapolated media imagery and mechanical means. Hirst himself is now constructing paintings, but rather by actually making them, whereas he used to fabricate his works using assistants as human silkscreens. For Hirst, a real artist needs to be someone who can paint. For self-legitimacy he is willing himself into fitting this romantic conception of an artist as a lone practitioner with brush, oils and thinner in hand toiling away in a garret.