Damien Hirst's autobiography in pictures, the breathlessly titled I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, is a scary book in more ways than anticipated.  How rapidly the artist has used himself up. How quickly - chainsaw quick, cutting straight to the marrow of his own imagination - he has stilled the body of his own creative impulses. The professionally morbid Gordon Burn, biographer of Peter Sutcliffe and Frederick West, has written a curiously sentimental introduction to Hirst's book - a kind of love letter from wistful middle-aged man to young Turk - at the end of which he finds himself groping for a way to convey his subject's vitality: "'Exhilaration', 'enchantment', 'disturbance', 'lucidity'.  Words to explain why, to his friends, Damien - 'Mister Death', the 'Dead Cow Man' - is the most living person they know." But love is blind and the true nature of the book which Burn is introducing appears to have escaped him.  Heavy as a tombstone, I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere etcetera is not affirmation but epitaph. It is an artist's way of acknowledging, by subsiding into retrospection for the first time in his career, that something is over and that something has died. Damien Hirst, RIP.
 
Hirst has often been compared to the other famous DH of British contemporary art. "Not since the emergence in the early Sixties of David Hockney, with his gold lame and camp aphorising, his ironising attitude and his instincts for the mechanisms of celebrity. . . has a British artist's passage to fame been so rapid and so spectacular," writes Gordon Burn. He is right, but there are other points of comparison besides. The young Hockney's prodigiousness turned out to be a burden...

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