Madness

On Wednesday evening the radio reported on contemporary artist Damian Hirst earning $260m in the last eighteen hours, auctioning pieces like this to...well, idiots.

I shook my head in disbelief and remarked to my passenger, a city businessman, “Why am I thinking-investment bankers and cocaine?” He laughed, “Probably because they both involve such an incredible rush.”

This probably explains the sort of motivation for paying over $20m for a pickled cow,

Charles Thomson, founder of the The Stuckist art movement, which promotes art with a meaning, said Hirst was not art but a "designer label. Just using an object like a dead animal is capable of very little meaning," he said. "He is not selling art. It's a form of madness."

The frenzied spending of money, madness, whether gambled on ridiculously risky financial products or incredibly indulgent ‘art’, can surely be attributed to drugs. In the case of investment bankers that drug would be cocaine, for those with too much money.