Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.

Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.

Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.

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.

It's like a little potted history of Australian art.

You know, the history of California art doesn't start until about 1961, and that's when these photographs start. I mean, we have no history out here.