Art has already died more times than Dracula, but down it goes again...

Jonathan Jones, who reviews old art for the Guardian, has written a savage attack on Damien Hirst and contemporary art:

Hirst's exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection [...] Hirst has said: I want to be compared directly with the old masters, on their own turf, in their own visual language. In his eyes, it would seem that all the readymades, all the vitrines – all the ideas that have made him rich – are not real art at all. They are substitutes for the art he wishes he could make. The one truly great art, in his eyes, is the high western tradition of oil painting. He can't do that at all; can't paint his way out of a paper bag. [...] No critic has even come close to the total dismissal of 21st-century art implied by Hirst's turnabout.