skull on a stick

They’ve been having a conversation over in the States about which piece of art, culture or entertainment sums up the Bush years. Kevin Drum thinks the answer is Damien Hirst’s entire output:

The only possible choice is everything ever manufactured by Damien Hirst, who has made a career out of convincing people to give him fantastic sums of money for stuff that everyone knows is obvious crap — and then lying about it on the occasions when people don't.

Actually, I think a diamond encrusted skull is a pretty good metaphor for the age just passed as a whole here in wider Anglostan: fuck you capitalism, violent death, screeching vulgarity, aggressive self satisfaction, the whole bombs and bonuses culture. There’s even a minor key riff in there on the moral vanity of liberal interventionism. You could put it on the shoulders of either of the Beckhams and no one would notice the difference. You could put that skull on a pedestal at Gitmo and make the inmates worship it. This is us, worms: submit. As such, it’s an inspired piece of work. But then money is the medium Hirst works in generally so perhaps he could be expected to understand.