In a world where everything is possible, highwayman Hirst is the

On the stand, Damien Hirst, yet again accused of plagiarism. This week's claims come from his apparent former friend, the New York- based artist John LeKay, who says he has been creating jewel- encrusted skulls since 1993, and that Hirst's latest work, For the Love of God, rips them off.

It's not as if previous accusations have proved groundless. When Robert Dixon, a graphics artist, contacted Hirst to point out that one of his dot pictures was simply a coloured version of one of his own designs, he received an email from Hirst's manager pointing out that, actually, Hirst's inspiration came from something in The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry. The manager was unaware that this was the design in question.

In an out-of-court settlement, Hirst paid an undisclosed sum to chil-dren's charities after infringing the copyright of Humbrol's Young Scientist toy, while his work Spirit, the image of a dove soaring through the sky, turned out to be almost identical to a rather tacky charity Christmas card. To top it all it has recently transpired that the theatre director Trevor Nunn paid [pound]37,000 for a Hirst original that was actually drawn by Hirst's two-year- old son and his chum. Yet Nunn had the last laugh when he revealed he had later sold the work for [pound]45,000. Which is what it's all about.

Hirst lives in an age where it's not about what you can do but what you can get away with. A highwayman on the art world fast track, he has the balls to steal ideas and make them bigger. He's not like Dr Raj Persaud, who countered claims of plagiarism with a fuzzy stream of excuses about having mixed up the other writer's notes with his own and lost track of which was which. Nor does he behave like the author Kaavya Viswanathan, who wrote in The New York Times of how her photographic memory was to blame for her "unconsciously" plagia-rising vast tracts of another woman's novel. And Hirst does not behave like Madonna, who steals imagery from other pop stars, such as Goldfrapp and her horses, and does it so much worse that it's embarrassing to look at. There is something deliciously mendacious about the way Hirst just cruises on through, enlarging and amplifying, making everything big, dazzling, clamorous.

If art was genuinely about the wonder of the thing itself, wouldn't it be enough for the other artists to see their works blown large, coloured-in, paraded for the world to see? Naturally, a nod to the provenance would be nice, but still, they say imitation is the best form of flattery.

Perhaps it is. Hirst is a warped sort of patron of other people's works - and sometimes he pays, too. Last year, he was rumoured to have paid [pound]100,000 to the artist Paul Fryer for an artwork that recreates lightning. I attended the private view of this work; it was beautiful, bizarre, quixotic and so short-lived as to be able to be only an anticlimax, literally a flash in the pan.

Fryer's next work was the creation of a star in a jar; these are things that humans never thought they could create, let alone buy and sell. Hirst, again, showed interest.

Blessed with the glorious minds of overgrown children, these men see nothing as impossible. Who says you can't pickle a shark? Who says you can't catalogue fish? Who says you can't buy a star in a jar? In these days of low-fat milk and semi-skimmed ideas, it's nice to see a big fat rumpus of art, as big and brassy as Jordan's bosom, and just as naturally acquired.

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