DAMIEN HIRST has worked with flayed cows' heads, maggots and dead fish. His latest exhibition, ''In and Out of Love'', includes a large number of Malaysian butterflies, hatched from the chrysalis, which will live out their natural lifespan in a climate-controlled commercial art gallery in the West End of London. The show, like the butterflies, is scheduled to last for six weeks.
Hirst's work sounds eccentric but it is also fairly conventional. It is a vanitas, designed to prompt thoughts about life and death. It is a work, too, which by reinventing the art gallery as an eco-system, suggests the links between art and the other kinds of artifice by which man shapes his environment. Hirst's butterflies have been hatched from chrysalises attached to canvases that hang on the gallery walls - a little heavy-handed in its symbolism, perhaps, this is a detail that nevertheless underlines the various themes that Hirst has, so far, chosen to address in his work. Art and nature, beauty and death, are inextricably mingled.
How do you know I didn't just make all that up? Life and death? Well, art critics are always going on about that sort of thing. The photograph? It could easily be a set-up, being just a picture of someone holding a butterfly in what might be an art gallery. If Damien Hirst didn't actually exist (he does) would it be so very hard to invent him? The question is not simply academic: the imaginary artist is a topical figure at the moment.
''So let's just get things straight. To be an artist, you don't have to make the art, you don't have to justify it, you don't have to sell it. Other people make the art and then other people make up some stuff about what it means. Well, it...
