Fresh out of ideas

The problem is not Damian Hirst's borrowing from others, but his own loss of originality
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Damien Hirst - new installation piece
Plagiarising himself ... Damien Hirst. Photograph: PA
There was a moment when the whole world was plagiarising Damien Hirst. Films, in the 1990s, had serial killers standing with shark-like grins inside glass vitrines. Wrapping paper came in coloured spots. Museums became self-conscious about the surreal nature of their collections. All this owed its fin-de-siecle vogue to a cocky artist and his obsession with death.

If you'd asked me, as recently as a year ago, what I thought of artist Robert Dixon's claim that the pattern of Hirst's print, Valium, is a spot-for-spot copy of his own design True Daisy, you'd have got a short, rude answer. As in, who bloody cares? Hirst is the most original artist of my generation, and I have watched his career with admiration, awe, and irritation at the large number of stupid things said about him.

Dixon's accusation is just another stupid thing said. It has even less pertinence than the claim that Hirst's anatomical sculpture, Hymn, copied a scientific toy - undeniable, and financially settled, but with no consequences for how one sees Hirst. The reason it has no relevance is that anything Hirst borrows becomes part of him, not through some stale reference to Marcel Duchamp, but because he established, by about 1992, such an imaginative artistic identity it can absorb whatever lies in its path. Hymn becomes a joke about his own development, a deliberately silly substitute for the human being cartoonists imagined him pickling. Valium makes an even less convincing "plagiarism". The print is part of the spot series Hirst has been making since 1991. The meaning of these lies in their seriality. If one owes its design to Dixon, so what?

Anyway, that's what I would have said, if it wasn't for the terrible change that has become manifest in Hirst, the premature, devastating loss of that fecundity and generosity his art seemed to so grandly possess. Hirst has not had a good idea for 13 years. In 1993 he created Mother and Child Divided, the most poetic of his animal works. After that, he started to flail. He went in for the jocular, piggy porkers on slides, cows having sex (that one failed to pass its technical), took a break and came back with self-parody, self-pity, mock Baroque and lousy verse. None of it is up to much even if, at the Venice Biennale a few years ago, he showed a glittering steel shelf unit arrayed with coloured pills that made everything else look dismal. The other art really was dismal. A stale Hirst is still a lot fresher than most of the goods at your average art fair.

Hirst's waning originality gives this accusation of plagiarism more resonance. With each new show, the paucity and repetition of Hirst's art is more blatant. It isn't borrowing from others that is the problem. The tragedy is his increasingly pathetic attempts to repeat, or pastiche, himself.

It doesn't do to compare him with Picasso, who pastiched contemporary and historical art yet produced something new every time. To make a comparison between, say, Picasso's quotations of Raphael, Rubens and his own Cubist style in Guernica and the awful, ugly, bronze colossus of a flayed pregnant woman that Hirst exhibited at the Royal Academy this year is to compare genius with dreck. Just think about this: when Hirst exhibited his anatomical man, it was, even fans had to admit, a decline from his vitrines. Now he strains to recapture even Hymn's heights.

In his day Hirst was, without question, the artist who most mattered in the entire world: the only artist whose images truly entered the culture's lifeblood after the death of Andy Warhol. Even when he started to go off, he was worth giving the benefit of the doubt. I could forgive him everything because he had imagination. Now that is gone it is hard to forgive him anything.

· Jonathan Jones is a Guardian art critic

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