Finally the day has dawned when media darling, and byproduct of the stringently, commercialised, shallow turn of the millennia, Damien Hirst has fallen from grace. The national press has almost unanimously declared Hirst a fraud as he opened the doors to his newest and most inexorably arid, self-indulgent and boorish artistic realization at the classical Wallace Collection.

Having ran out of ideas, pickled livestock and bedazzled human remains he presented a series of 25 paintings under the appellation 'No Love Lost, Blue Paintings'. Standing proudly beside two of his works encased in ostentatiously aurelian frames, with his marmot eyes snug behind the 2mm lenses, Damien perorated: 'They're all by me!' At least he had the balls to own up, because, by God, I know I wouldn't have done. The paintings ripe with trifling trademark signifiers of mortality such as skulls, cadavers, ashtrays and sharks, floating aimlessly on midnight blue backgrounds mapped out with a mesh of perspective lines looked, to paraphrase the great Robert Hughes, like tacky secretions of an overzealous neophyte. The metaphors for these works seemed equally as gauche as their execution, but then Hirst was never really an artist but rather a vainglorious profiteer who made his name turning marinated bovine in to cash cow so I suppose I should have lowered my expectations a dash.

The show comes complete with a fully-paid-for gallery refurbishment including silk drapes commissioned from Marie Antoinette's preferred manufacturers at a cost that would leave most of us and our descendants in debt. For years artists died in penury usually syphilitic, earless, doped-up and without acclaim. Now, however, they are multi-millionaires, who employ people to mass produce their art in factory workshops before putting it up for sale at Saatchi...but whatever, this is progress I guess.

Personally, I never understood, nor saw, shock value in any one of Hirst's attempts. I mean the Pre-Raphelites had it, the Modernists had it, even Picasso had it in his own way, Hirst, however, like the rest of the very prolifically pointless Brit Art brat pack never had the capacity to shock simply because he has never conceived an original idea in his life. All the debris he has ever produced, in an attempt to test the parameters of decency and good taste, is a result of shameless appropriation and thereby founded on regurgitations of something someone else had done years ago. Thus regardless of how Hirst fashions his latest collection the paintings lack substance, appear irresolute, unassertive and cautious suggesting uncertainty on the painter's behalf. Stylistically they've been compared to Francis Bacon, which is of course absurd. These optical monstrosities have not a dash of virtuosity, in fact Hirst's botched attacks on canvas are outside the range of mediocrity; they are inexpertly derivative, their execution's poor, they're awkward and monotonous and view like turgid doodles of an anxious first year arts and crafts student.

The exhibition next door to the Wallace Collection's rooms of Old Masters such as Titian, Rembrandt, Poussin, Fragonard, and Gainsbourgh was chosen, I expect, to elevate the importance of Hirst's solo project. And in a sly underhand dig at his contemporaries Hirst explained his choice of location, by claiming: 'you get a bit bored of modern art galleries', yet I feel he had more grandiose motives than that, namely glaring self-delusion in a fit of which he made himself believe he's worthy in the great tradition, among the Masters which is,of course, yet another fallacy. Similar to the one which wants us convinced that Hirst is in some way a protege of Bacon...hilarious methinks... But never mind the fetor of mendacity Damien take heed of this and, please, give up the day job: 'Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise,' and furthermore, 'You're dead son, get yourself buried.'

Oh and CUNT.