Damien Hirst's new exhibition at the Wallace Collection is evidence of a deal between nervous guardians of the past and a contemporary artist seeking to burnish his future historical credentials. It stinks. Entitled No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst ­ - the clunking allusion to Picasso's Blue Period marks out the scale of Hirst's ambition -­ it presents 25 paintings that we are assured are actually by Hirst rather than a cohort of assistants.

Is site-specific the new collaboration? What I mean by this is that where it was once the fashion for artists and dancers (think Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham) or film directors and opera houses (Anthony Minghella and the ENO) to mix art forms, now it is fashionable to have work inspired by and installed in a particular place.

That artists didn't just respond to the rapacious commercialism of the late 20th century, but actively contributed to it is hardly news. That the marketing of art can be part of the art itself  is something everyone now implicitly understands, even if it’s only through hearing Tracey Emin wittering about herself on television.

History is written in blood, however elegant the cover. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the collapse in 1521 of the Aztec Empire, a culture that presented Europe with a vision of such otherness that it could only be destroyed. In 2002, the Royal Academy of Arts tried to persuade us to look beyond the grisly tales of human sacrifice to a more nuanced portrait of a people steeped in gory rituals that we, soaked in the serial-killer television porn of the 21st century, might strangely understand.

I don't think I've ever seen quite so high a patron:picture ratio as at the Cindy Sherman opening at Sprüth Magers on Grafton Street last night. The gallery verily overflowed with an unaccustomed mixture of Mayfair and Shoreditch, spilling out onto the street where neon t-shirts rubbed shoulders with tailored suits, all to see three pictures.