What separates art and artefact? At the British Museum, the question always seems pressing. Earlier this year, the Ice Age exhibition showed us art at its purest, carved from ritual and superstition. The first representations of the female form, faceless and totemic, stood inside their glass cases like an abyss, demanding we accept the ancient, sacred purpose of creativity. But this power, although aesthetic, was not simply artistic; at the museum’s current attraction, documenting the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79, we find a simple household cupboard has the same transporting effect.

The power of objects and images in a museum, regardless of their artistic merits, is the power of artefact. We are struck by their profound detachment from the present, and are left with a lingering sense of mystery. Glimpsing experiences so distant and different to our own, our attempts at comprehension stall. It is difficult to imagine art produced today generating this effect. But why?

As I stood before the ceramic drinking vessels of Pompeii, I found myself thinking of another cup I had seen some time ago: an espresso cup in the Tate Modern gift shop. It was ergonomic and attractive, the saucer patterned with a close-knit floral design, reflected in a smooth, convex arc by the mirrored surface of the cup itself. For an instant it swelled with significance, a modern artefact in its own right. But then the mood was shattered. Beside the cup was a glossy black cardboard box, like that of an Apple accessory, and just as sharply branded. The word, a name: HIRST.

You may feel that Damien Hirst has already received too much attention. However, his conspicuous tale illustrates why contemporary art is so often unable to stir life in us today.As his modish box suggests, Damien Hirst is no ordinary name, but a brand, manufactured by Charles Saatchi’s PR machine to increase the value of the works he had already bought. He is the golden tooth in the crooked smile of the art establishment, reflecting our commercial and media obsessions in the grin of a diamond skull. His art was a trick, its success revealing the corruption of popular responses to art by PR culture, with its twin pillars of money and celebrity.

The problem here is not that…

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