I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now

What you are about to experience is a superbly intelligent visual introduction ot Hirst's process united with breathtaking depictions of the results.

A tiny note for the "practical book-user": This book is a work of Damien Hirst's. In such a publication one should not be surprised to find "safety guidlines" on how to successfully "deal with one's own life" - by using a gun. Gun owners might think twice before showing this book to their loved ones. Yet that's another story. Or maybe not, from Hirst's point of view? :*)

Hirst, candidly, sees the art world as always part of the work and space of art, and it is a part he sometimes enjoys, sometimes struggles with, and whose successes he has rightly benefited from. In 1996 Hirst displayed the body of a cow cut up and suspended in 12 vitrines. The piece was called Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything. Hirst seems to have decided that the inevitability of death, so futilely hidden by a society obsessed with youth and health, is the only truth--or rather, perhaps, the only incisive fact that may help us to fully live now and eschew those lies in which we all swim and in which we are always in danger of drowning. On the Way to Work is an excellent book and much recommended to anyone who has been fascinated by the sudden rise in the visibility of modern art and what it has to say about society at the beginning of the 21st century. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk

Damien Hirst is one of the most controversial, influential, and fascinating artists working today, and arguably the most famous. From the controversy of his early work to the political storm surrounding the arrival of the exhibition Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, his work has redefined international expectations of modern art. Even people with only a passing knowledge of art are familiar with his installations of a shark, cows, and sheep pickled in formaldehyde.

On the Way to Work is an extremely candid autobiography of Hirst presented in a series of conversations. He expounds in unpredictable and scabrously funny ways on everything from art to celebrity to sex, and these frank and intimate conversations are punctuated with art from all phases of his career chosen by Hirst himself. This book is a window into Hirst's world: growing up in working class northern England, roughhousing in pubs, obsessing about life and death, questioning art world fame, and believing that art and beauty make a difference in the modern world.

In addition to the attention he generates, this dynamic artist also garners critical acclaim-he is the winner of the Turner Prize and, ever since the groundbreaking exhibition that he organized as a fledgling artist in the early nineties, he is considered the unofficial leader of the Young British Artists movement. Hirst's appeal goes beyond the world of art; he's an influential figure to architects, designers, and the fashion crowd as well. Engaging, well-illustrated, and a real event in the art world, On the Way to Work, like its subject, will generate controversy and acclaim.

Hirst is at his best playing enfant-terrible/raconteur, spitting out stories of a hardscrabble childhood and grand-guignol adolescence, rejecting the polite aesthetics of art school, and raging against the vapidity of an art world that would use his creative rage for its own amusement. At their best, Hirst's rants can be of a piece with his art: visceral, gut-wrenching, profoundly disturbing. Yet at times he simply prattles on ad nauseum.

Rather than rein the artist in, interviewer Gordon Burn lets Hirst flail wildly, challenging him only when directly taunted; and Hirst seems to desire nothing so much as a loud pub brawl with a worthy adversary. Burn's polite questioning proves no match for his subject's wry vitriol and relentless bombast.

What both Hirst and Burn understand quite clearly is the infuriating, mind-numbing business of celebrity, and its potential for warping an artist's work. In this respect, the book's first interview, dating from 1992, is heartbreaking: it's a talk with a precocious, cocky, smart Damien Hirst, just before he tumbled into the voracious maw of the international art scene. The subsequent interviews are often meandering and unfocused -- but not without some cynically brilliant bits.

This portrait of an artist careening into jaded middle age is wildly entertaining at times, but it will certainly disappoint any readers hoping for profound insights on contemporary British art. At one point during an interview tirade, the artist opines: "You're either angry or you're boring." With ON THE WAY TO WORK, Damien Hirst manages to have it both ways.

Discussing the visual arts successfully in words is often held to be an impossible task. In fact it is merely difficult. And since the days of the ancient Greeks, many writers of all kinds have taken up the challenge -- not only art critics but novelists, poets, gossips, artists, and essayists. In The Grove Book of Art Writing, Martin Gayford and Karen Wright have collected the best and most lively attempts to pin it down, in a single-volume cornucopia of writing on art. From Vasari and Freud on why Mona Lisa smiles, to Adolf Hitler on the degeneracy of modernism, to Picasso on how to measure the depiction of the female body, art historians, art critics, artists, as well as the aforementioned weigh in on what makes art so wonderful, frustrating, what makes it art. From the deadly serious to the deeply witty, from the sublime to the ridiculous, The Grove Book of Art Writing is an eloquent compendium of insight into the diverse ways the visual arts can be seen and thought about.

My only other complaint is the constant recurrence of those completely nightmarish perversions of conceptual art, the "living sculptures"(or charlatans, as I like to call them) Gilbert and George, laced oddly throughout the book for no apparent reason. What do they do? In a nutshell, they go about and place themselves in context, in photos or live. Why they think they're interesting wherever they're placed, or make a place interesting by their presence, is beyond me, but they've apparently made a great deal of loot from this. Go figure. John Roberson