Artistic Differences

Damien Hirst Feuds With Street Artist

Damien Hirst is feuding with Cartrain, a 19-year-old street artist who used the image of the famed artist’s legendary diamond skull in a series of collaged portraits of Hirst. The reputed world’s richest artist demanded Cartrain hand over all of his works using the infamously garish piece For the Love of God, for which he created a human skull in platinum and adorned it with thousands of diamonds. Yet Cartrain gifted one to The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Jones deems the piece, in which the skull wears Hirst's signature nerdy thick-framed glasses and has a blue butterfly between his teeth, as an “an excellent Dadaist collage that makes a lot of ‘official’ contemporary art look pretentious.” Jones will not surrender the work to Hirst’s lawyers, refusing to let the rich continue to steal from the poor.