Damien Hirst Cries Foul

Young British artist Damien Hirst is feuding with a 19-year-old street artist named Cartrain, who used the image of the Hirst’s legendary diamond skull in a series of collaged portraits of Hirst. Though Hirst demanded Cartrain hand over all of his works using the infamously garish piece For the Love of God—a human skull was recreated in platinum and adorned with thousands of diamonds—Cartrain gifted one to The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Jones deems the piece, which depicts the skull wearing Hirst's signature nerdy thick-framed glasses and with a blue butterfly between its teeth, as an “excellent Dadaist collage that makes a lot of ‘official’ contemporary art look pretentious” and will not surrender the work to Hirst’s lawyers.