Saturday Night’s HAUSGUESTS art exhibition / event raised awareness and money for the fight to Save Darfur.

To say that it was well-attended is laughable - the place was mobbed for four hours plus, with dozens and dozens of artworks selling - many of which were priced in the bargain range relative to the names and sales-record of most of these artists.

Organizing Artists William Rabe and Nena Amsler are to be congratulated as EXEMPLARS of what artists can do within a local community to make an impact on a global scale.

My Ask Mat Column is intermittently online at the THAT AIN’T ART blog.

Down to his almost invisibly generic name, Robert Wilson is about as far from the celeb-artist persona embodied by Damian Hirst as is humanly possible. And yet his solo show at Ace Gallery (which opened Friday Night), trounced Gagosian’s Hirst show at every turn.

Wilson, the American, used celebrities as beautiful accoutrements to his overwhelming digital artworks. Hirst used his own crude celebrity to push product out the inventory door.

Wilson’s high-tech digital portraits, utilizing Voom HD monitors, presented living subjects. Hirst’s low-tech glue jobs presented death at the master’s studio assistants’ hands.

Wilson’s lit monitors were exhibited in a darkened gallery that was then made to glow with life in an ethereal space that functioned as an experiential sculpture all on its own. Hirst’s spectacle required garish lighting to illuminate the butterfly wings in order to mimic stained glass, a cheap effect made all the more hilarious by watching a cranky Larry Gagosian regularly beelining to his gallery’s home depot light switches as the gaggle of gawkers at his gallery continually bumped into them and threw flourescent assaults on the already overwhelming incandescent display.

So we hit some galleries today. Michael Maas at L2Kontemporary was good stuff, as was visiting Gallery Revisited on Sunset Boulevard – we walked in as a collector was choosing a painting to buy – there were a lot of red dots everywhere.

So then the drive to Beverly Hills to see Damian Hirst’s butterfly collages at Gagosian. The highlight of the night my sole celebrity sighting, Robbie Robertson. The crowd was impressive but not stellar. The art. Well…

In the 80s, appropriation was the rage – so much art was predicated on using the imagery of others as compositional fodder. The Appropriation trend died, along with a lot of the theory on which it was propped, but these artworks hark straight back to the 80s. They simply appropriate straight from nature (instead of pop culture) – using actual butterflies arranged symmetrically to mimic the patterns of stained cathedral glass windows.

The one and only strength of these works is their scale - which is overwhelming and almost breathtaking, but ultimately makes a visual product that is more geared to decorate a high-end shirt and slacks boutique than to be considered “art”…

Consider some of the big shows at Gagosian Beverly Hills in the past few years: Koons (appropriating banal advertising images as oversized collages), Schnabel (appropriating thrift store portrait paintings as oversized paintings) and now Hirst (appropriating butterfly wings as oversized decoupages).

Hirst’s show packs a solid first WOW and flitters away quickly, like a butterfly, to the point of almost no impact. These are ultimately the artworks from an imagination on par with a Star Trek devotee, excitedly showing off the beauty of one species on his planet while cleverly commenting on the futile aspirations of the belief systems of the fellow members of his species yet all the while unaware of how far his clever dioramas are from ever really being “ART” at all.