kabuki drama always attends his displays, with both sides playing their rehearsed parts. Cash versus culture is at the heart of the Hirst conundrum: this is the man who announced that money is "the key to the world" and is unashamed about making a lot of it. Criticising Hirst's art because people are prepared to pay a lot for it is just daft: money and art have always been intimately linked since the great Renaissance artists knocked out portraits of the Medicis to pay the rent. Knocking him because he no longer assembles his own works is equally odd: from the masters of Delft to Andy Warhol, art has often had a factory component, just as many of Brecht's plays were improved by barely acknowledged collaborations. It is the power of his ideas and his drive which makes a Hirst stay in our minds, where so many other purveyors of quirky oddity fade or date. He tackles the grand themes of life and death; the bemused human condition, reliant on the potions of his eerie pharmacy to keep decrepitude at bay; and the losing battle against the grim reaper, who stalks this work in formaldehyde and electrocuted insects. I do wonder whether we are really complaining that Hirst captures the zeitgeist a bit too painfully, from his fixation on mortality with the ubiquitous cigarette butts (heirs to the scythe in portraits) to the gaudy eye-feasts of butterflies. AS Byatt points out in her astute The Matisse Stories that the French