The reaction to the auction and its contents has run the gamut from doomsday end-of-civilization laments and serves-you-right righteousness directed at the art world, to the crowning of Mr. Hirst as superartist and speaker of deep truths (mostly in the essays in Sotheby's lavish three-volume catalog), to complete indifference, feigned or otherwise, on the part of many dealers.
"The End of Courtship?" lamented a recent headline in The Times; the story with it traced the waning of wining and dining, the triumph of Facebook updates over face-to-face heart-to-hearts.
In 2001, the critic Greil Marcus named Sleater-Kinney the best rock band in America, and when it went on indefinite hiatus, five years later, the news triggered many end-of-an-era laments.
There is a touch of lament, an end-of-season feel about Touch of Evil, the last great film noir of Hollywood's golden age.
The critic Robert Brustein lamented the end of culture (he is lamenting it still).
"It's the end of an era," lamented his neighbor, a telecommuter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering her landlord.
Whenever there is a purge, teams like ourselves seem to get the thin end of the wedge," lamented their manager, Mark Hughes, betraying the hints of a persecution complex.
Rather, as with the college guys at the other end of the bar lamenting yet another epic collapse by their beloved Jets (this was before the team got good), it was that I'd heard the complaint so often it had become tiresome.
Have we reached "the end of labor," as Noah Smith laments in The Atlantic?
In South Africa the ruling African National Congress (dismissed by Mrs Thatcher as a terrorist organisation), said it had been "on the receiving end of her policy", and lamented her "failure to isolate apartheid" by agreeing to sanctions.In Russia, though Vladimir Putin, the president, paid tribute to her historic role, the obituaries were short and did not make the front pages.
