Janet Street-Porter: A man who is tired of Damien Hirst...

So Robert Hughes thinks Damien Hirst's work is absurd and nothing more than clever marketing. That tells us more about Mr Hughes's preoccupation with his own position in the fickle world of fame than anything else, timed as it was to promote a television programme he's authored.

Curmudgeonly and intellectually pompous, Robert Hughes has increasingly seemed to me like a critic who's reached his sell-by date, who deeply resents being gradually sidelined. Sure, he made a ground-breaking television series, The Shock of the New, several decades ago, but all he seems to have done in the intervening years is pile on the pounds while his (undoubtedly) prodigious brain gradually atrophies into promoting the art of yesteryear.

The tragedy of Bob Hughes is that he can't acknowledge that Hirst, like Warhol and Bacon, is a perfect reflection of our times. Does Hughes really expect kids today to connect with the vapid pretentiousness of Rothko and the abstract expressionists of the 1950's?

At this point I will declare an interest. A few months ago I received a call from Damien Hirst's assistant. A little while later a package was delivered – six large watercolours and a pencil drawing, all signed and dedicated to me. The series of portraits were completed in 2004, when I'd asked Damien if I could use a small sketch he'd given me (executed on the back of a menu at a birthday party) on a poster for my one-woman show All the Rage. He said he'd do something new, and I ended up sitting for a couple of hours while he drew, painted, photographed and nattered, all at breakneck speed.

The end result, a demonic gorgon sporting giant gnashers dripping blood, covered with multi-coloured spots, was hardly flattering, but it worked brilliantly. The portraits are equally merciless, capturing me in a way that's not flattering, but brutally honest. "Never try and sell them" warned a friend. Apparently Damien has tombstones in his garden in Devon on which he engraves the names of all the people who sell works he has given to them.

My association with Damien goes back to 1992, when he exhibited his first shark piece and "A Thousand Years", a glass case filed with flies and maggots feeding off a cow's severed head. I was producing an opera for the BBC, a modern version of The Vampire by Marschner, and we shot the opening scenes in the Saatchi gallery with Hirst's work as our backdrop.

That year, Damien was nominated for the Turner Prize, and it marked two things. A dreary art event suddenly got totally revitalised, and – for the first time since the gallery's British Pop Art show of the 1960s – young people and schoolkids flocked to the Tate in their thousands. Suddenly art was as exciting as pop music.

It's easy to stop getting enthusiastic, to start sneering like Mr Hughes. But over the last 16 years Damien Hirst hasn't just made art that infuriates, stimulates and provokes us. He's single-handedly halted the dead hand of American cultural imperialism. Sure, he has an army of assistants. So did Andy Warhol. Sure, Damien's work is ludicrously expensive. But it's only worth what collectors will pay for it.

Damien, the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin have crossed from being successes within the art world to household names who make the national and international news.

Great art's what you want it to be, and I want it to be provocative. No one does that better than Damien.

Get real, Victoria

Is it a faun? Is it Bambi? Is it a Thunderbirds puppet of Audrey Hepburn? To ensure maximum publicity, Victoria Beckham's new hairstyle was cleverly unveiled at the same time as her first dress collection, which she showed in New York this week. The cheeky cut is great. Surely Victoria will be immortalised as a Disney cartoon character, a princess who wobbles about in high heels wearing skintight clothes and who shuns normal food, nibbling at the odd lettuce leaf.

The New York fashion shows have produced two conundrums, the first being the vile collection by Sex and the City stylist Patricia Field for Marks & Spencer. I don't know anyone who's going to wear a two-tiered frock covered in garish roses for a whopping £99. Victoria flew the flag by showing 10 unoriginal dresses, all skintight and reaching the knee, retailing for upwards of £600! It's going to take more than an urchin cut to flog that lot, Posh.

OMG r u serious?

A leading academic, Professor John C Wells, President of the Simplified Spelling Society, wants to abolish the apostrophe and thinks teachers should be more "relaxed" about spelling. Professor Wells is concerned that kids who are more used to text speak will struggle with literacy.

He's right about the apostrophe – am I the only person in the UK who bought Lynne Truss's desperately unfunny book and couldn't manage to read more than 10 pages?

But spelling? The point of school is learning, isn't it? If it was an excuse to hang out, send emails and use your mobile, then it wouldn't be called school, and could take place in a bus shelter or by the bins in your local shopping precinct.

Nothing more dismal than an academic trying to connect wiv yoof, innit?

Meat is ... mmm, delicious

Recently I received a text from a well-known vegetarian who was furious that I was promoting British veal on The F Word. WHY R U PROMOTING EATING MEAT? she bleated, and that sums up the problem facing vegetarians. We carnivores never start carrying placards announcing WHY EAT VEGETABLES, do we? Now, the chair of the UN Panel on Climate change wants us to give up meat one day a week, as 18 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases come from cattle bred for human consumption. Luckily, our dairy farmers have discovered that a blend of cut straw and hay, which can be mixed into cattle feed, reduces the methane gas emitted when cows chew by 20 per cent. Hoorah!

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