Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.