Harold Pinter AT 76

Harold Pinter can't be an easy man to interview. Instead of coming to the studio with his answers prepared (and packaged in shrink-wrap) like a politician or celeb, he chooses to engage humanly with his interviewer and do his thinking  in the moment. Glibness would be shaming to him; only the right words will do; and the interviewer can only watch and grit her teeth as he chases them down one by one like a butterfly hunter with his little net.   He's old now and has nearly died twice so the words take longer to catch and sometimes evade him altogether. He says little, almost nothing that is revelatory, but also nothing that isn't entirely what he means.

One word came to me and wouldn't go away, so here it is; "honourable".

Damien Hirst

Damien Hurst has a thirty foot statue on exhibition in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. It's modelled on Degas' Little Dancer, only Hirst's dancer is pregnant and one half of her has been flayed, exposing her bones and the child in her womb.

It's the sort of thing Dali might have done (and how old hat is that?) only Dali would have been less literal and more dreamlike-  more genuinely odd. 

Dali got a bad press for chasing the dollar, but that was then and this is now and Hirst- a country house-dwelling multi-millionaire- gets little but respect for what he does.

I'm not saying  Hirst's a phoney; things like his pickled shark and bisected cow have established themselves as modern icons; but his work has always been a bit obvious, a bit vulgar, a bit fairground freak-show (like Dali's) and all the signs are he's run out of ideas. 

And so (still like Dali) he's gone for excess and scale. The flayed dancer is a dull idea and making it totally ginormous doesn't hide the poverty of inspiration. His latest project is reported to be a plantinum skull encrusted all over with diamonds.  

A platinum skull encrusted with diamonds.  I can see it in my mind's eye. It's a image from an unwritten Jacobean play (probably by John Webster). Cool.  Now lets talk about something else.  

You're not actually going to bother to make it, are you?

Dali, too, in his final phase, turned to jewellery.