Drugstore cowboy...

Interesting story about a bitter feud between Damian Hirst and graffiti artist Cartrain. Cartrain used Hirst's image of a diamond encrusted skull in some of his work and was hit by a barrage of legal letters... Cartrain took revenge by stealing a box of pencils from Hirst's installation piece Pharmacy... Read the full story from the Independent here...

The Pharmacy installation:

If Hirst and Pharmacy sound familiar you may have been to the Notting Hill bar/restaurant called Pharmacy - designed by Hirst and opened in 1997. I went there once or twice and it was a hip place although somewhat sterile and cold... The bar came into dispute with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, which claimed the name, the pill bottles and the medical items on display, could confuse people looking for a real pharmacy. The name itself was breaching the Medicines Act 1968, which restricts the use of the word pharmacy. The bar's name was subsequently changed to Army Chap, an anagram of pharmacy and closed in 2003...

Pharmacy Bar/Restaurant in Notting Hill:

My opinion? Hirst needs to get over himself. For a start he is recycling his own 10 year old ideas for the Pharmacy installation. He should also read what Peter Saville wrote about appropriation/plagiarism:

In this post-modern era, the notion of plagiarism didn't come into it. If Jeff Koons took a photograph of a Nike ad and put it in a gallery, at the time nobody called it plagiarism. He was obviously making a statement about Nike and the art market. To me, it was better to quote Futurism verbatim, for example, than to parody it ineptly. It was a more honest, more intellectual and in a way more artistic approach. It was so literal and so obvious that it never crossed my mind that people would think that I invented this work. But some did. People were shocked because they thought that I had created an original and were disappointed to discover that it was reinterpreting a previous work. I think they were missing the point.