Hey there, thanks for writing back. I'm glad we are discussing!

Curators, like people from other disciplines, approach their subject and projects from a wide range of angles and with many strategies.

Many show exclusively those who aren't known, and others do the opposite. It all depends on where you are looking, but I take your note to speak to the more main stream Museum or Institutional curators, and it is well taken. Although I will tell you that being a curator is a huge amount of work, research, traveling, writing, and thinking about art of all kinds from all places. We have to insert some criteria, and at times there are artists who slip through due to their commercial success. But it is rare that their work doesn't hold water as curators are, in some ways, gate keepers who have to explain, justify, insert and interpret narratives around the artwork.

My comment to you was out of interest to break down Hirst's exhibition through a critical lens, not asking what is he doing in a cynical way, but what do you think he is getting at? Or is he simply being critical of the art market and system? I think that is a bit to easy, don't you? His earlier work could be read in so many different ways that aren't simply about excess and $. As a curator I work hard to show artists from a broad range of backgrounds with many ideas, forms, and approaches. There is no formula as to who should and shouldn't be shown, and who is great or not. Many of today's most famous artists started life in a very different place. Warhol came from a mining town near Pittsburgh PA. He was born with none of the advantages you speak of, yet he transcended his conditions and made incredibly important contributions to Art History and Culture. Not everyone can do that unfortunately.

Robert Hughes is trying to apply criteria from a bygone era to the work of today. He doesn't actually say anything here just lays out rather negative statements and cynical questions that he has already decided he knows the answer to. Why ask a question if you have the answer prepped?

Also that video was edited in a way that is hard to swallow. The jump cuts are a bit obvious...and imply that their conversation probably took a different shape if we had seen all of it.

I'm asking you, and others who are interested, to look a bit deeper at Hirst's work. Apply the logic(s) of our society to it, what do you see, what does it bring up? And if he is being critical of opulence then that is a point well made and taken, no?

Let's keep chatting on this and other exhibitions.