Damien Hirst is offering his services as a mentor for young artists. He is an official mentor for the Future Generation art prize, which he is helping to launch this week at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.
As if he has not done enough already to corrupt the young.
A devastating set of figures released last week by the OECD revealed that Britain is falling behind much of the developed world in basic literacy and numeracy. In England and Ireland, 16- to 24-year-olds come 19th in literacy and 21st in numeracy in this global comparison. It's a pretty rancid performance for the nation of Shakespeare and Newton.
Of course it would be unfair to blame Damien Hirst personally for this decline (older Britons did better in the tests). But he and the revolution he unleashed in British art have helped to define the cultural landscape in which 16- to 24-year-olds emerged from childhood. Alongside overpaid football players and reality television shows, modern British art has relentlessly pumped out a dispiriting message to the young: education is worthless. Books and sums are for losers. You can earn more money and respect by pickling a shark than by swotting.
Once, Hirst had real wit, imagination and originality. But that has been eclipsed by his incredible financial career, which has turned him into something genuinely dangerous. Britain has writers and scientists of world standing, but art has become our contemporary cultural signature and Hirst our most renowned creative figure. As such, he sends out a very clear message that art is about making money from nothing.
It may be coincidence that British education has toppled over an abyss in the age of Britart. But if you wanted to encourage the young to despise knowledge, the tireless Hirstian message that empty images mean more than words, and money means more than either, would be quite an effective virus to release in some hideous act of anti-intellectual warfare.
• Don't lose your head over Hirst, says Jonathan Jones
• Damien Hirst has brought public art to a new low
