Whether or not Damien Hirst is a rebel who was embraced by and/or embraced money and mainstream is not exactly the point -- if fact, it is questionable whether he, or his immediate contemporaries, ever were in opposition to anything. They emerged at the inevitable moment when post-modern aesthetics was swallowed whole by neo-liberalism (which made a joke of the junk neo-Marxism that underlay it).
I was pointing to the difference between Fluxus in the ‘70s and the YBAs in the ‘90s -- which is a different world, a separate impulse, morality, and reality. The ‘70s conceptualism, along with preceding and contemporaneous abstractions and diversions, Pop to Land Art and all of that, ended up providing material for a specific and rarefied art market. This was a developing circuit of artists, collectors, dealers, curators, gallery owners, critics, academics, and media producers who established and protected an extensive investment network in the ’80s that worked in compact with an ostensive radical critical discourse. An increasingly important form of merchandise turned out to be a media-packaged "fun nihilism", exemplified in the UK by Goldsmiths alumni and consummated in the Sensations exhibition. This is somehow in a lineage with and yet entirely different to Joseph Beuys and Cindy Sherman, although it is difficult to explain how.
I consider the end point to be Martin Creed (more than Damien Hirst) who produces clean and colourful Fluxuseque ephemera, empty of content or context. He simply lets the critical and commercial apparatus go to work and make money for him. He provides the object and the critics create the concept for him thus providing the conditions for sale. His talent is for making money from an illusion by devising a visual experience to suit a critical discourse. This is the essence of conceptual art now and is a wider condition of contemporary art in general, which must play to and by these rules.
Because this is the relevant stuff: the radical is conceptual, which is the only work worth doing. Innovate and transgress as this is the quickest, clearest way to be taken seriously by serious critics, serious collectors; it is a pass to the big international art fairs and the important downtown galleries. If you are not employing this particular visual and theoretical language you have no place at the Frieze Art Fair, which is where deals and connections make careers. (Careers, rather than bodies of work.)
The work challenges. It suggests. It celebrates. It deconstructs. It encourages unexpected links. It is an exploration. It disrupts and it undermines. It suggests and it investigates. It raises questions. It exposes and it explores. It negotiates and questions. It disrupts and it undermines as it suggests and as it negotiates. It is all about intransitive verbs that make money circulate. The ideas are no longer really there. The visual commitment is merely a game or an unspecified suggestion or an actual evasion. It is all a question of what the work is doing or is said to be doing -- not its meaning, but some alleged and obtuse critique or less direct critical activity. The visual language and media is debased or awash in technology. Fine art has no cultural urgency or function, so is replaced by this illusory circulation of ideas which manages to make money and keep the whole enterprise of galleries, criticism, and dealers going. I would say this is the condition of contemporary art rather than conceptual art, but the more you think about it, the only relevant contemporary art (the stuff that matters, makes the money, keeps the Frieze fallacy in business, say) is the conceptual, and the radically conceptual, at that.