Two views on art ...

... one from Nige: Samuel Palmer's Tree.

... and one from Bryan: On Damien Hirst.

If you are unfamiliar with the Palmer painting Nige refers to, here is Pastoral with a Horse-Chestnut Tree. Nige raises some interesting questions: "Having once absorbed Palmer's tree, it's no longer possible to see a living horse chestnut except through the Palmer filter. Does this, I wonder, make the tree more or less itself? What was it before Palmer drew it? Did it take Palmer to fully see it for the first time, and pass on its essence to us? I suspect the last is the case, and that the tree is therefore more itself, more real." One of the principal effects that great representational art - and I mean the term in its broadest sense - is to enable us to see the world better, to know better how to look at it.

I would add a slight refinement to Bryan's commentary. "Hirst follows Duchamp and Warhol in eliminating craft from the equation," Bryan says. None of the three quite eliminated it. It is simply that the craft Duchamp and Warhol were skilled in, and that Hirst is clearly also skilled in - marketing - is not one we tend to associate with great art.