DAMIEN Shirt has had enough of Damien Hirst.

“What I find is that his art is basically pretentious, derivative, cynical and very empty,” says the York anti-artist, whose retaliatory debut exhibition opens with a 7.30pm preview on Monday at the Norman Rea Gallery, University of York.

As the show title of Damien Shirt and Friends would indicate, Shirt will be sharing wall space with two fellow York artists, landscape oil pointer Hannah West, who is in the process of establishing an art therapy unit, and polymath Rory Motion, the poet, songwriter, musician and broadcaster, who is very much on first-name terms with the newcomer.

“In 1916-17, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a toilet bowl, a readymade French urinal, in Paris. It deserved to cause a stir and it did, but that that should have been the end of it, and that was nearly 100 years ago,” says Shirt, over coffee and a cloud of smoke emanating from his roll-up fag outside a York city-centre café bar.

Duchamp’s Fountain was not, however, the end of it.

“In the early Sixties, there was an Italian artist called Piero Manzoni who purported to… well, he sold these tins with purportedly his own excrement in them, and I now realise that having investigated it, he was a Damien Shirt prototype… not a Damien Hirst prototype. His work was a reaction, an angry response.”

Cans, but not the aforementioned contents, make a reappearance in the art of Shirt, who has customised 90 food cans, a limited edition that should now be taken with a pinch of salt and a step backwards at the price of £29.99 each.

Please note, cans of Shirt’s Adorable Kitten’s Pineal Glands (the third eye, biology fans) come with a list of ingredients that conveys exactly what it says on the tin: Satire (24%), Righteous anger (23%), Carrots (19%), Humour (16%), Tomato sauce (14%), Glee (4%), Adorable kitten’s pineal glands…(0%).

Should you baulk at paying £29.99, Shirt has history on his side.

“A limited edition of 90 is exactly what Piero Manzoni did, but he sold his at the price of gold per ounce, and I think he sold them all. The Tate bought one for £22,000 and only two years ago, one sold for $80,000,” he says, before delighting in the revelation that when one of the Manzoni cans was opened, its contents were revealed to be plaster of Paris.

“Whether the owner was happy to find they’d been deceived…”

The thought tails off, but Shirt is serious in having a laugh at the absurdity of art’s fashions and pretensions.

“So, for example, I’ll have two pieces of firewood next to each other. One will say Piece Of Firewood, price £1.50, and next to it will be Piece Of Firewood With Irony, price £9,000,” he says.

“And because Damien Shirt is the man of the moment, he’ll keep producing pieces throughout the show, so it will differ from today-to-day, adding new work as others are sold.”

Shirt may not resist the temptation to “do some shirts” and he definitely will be charging £2.99 for certificates that certify buyers have wisely purchased Nothing, essentially a piece of paper with a guarantee of total nothingness.

He wants Nothing to mean something.

“It’s credit-crunch nihilism, and it’s useful in the development of your artistic discernment to trash everything,” he reasons. “Young people dismiss everything before finding things that they believe in, and with Damien Shirt’s work they can do that at a very reasonable price,” he says.

“To me, offering Nothing for £2.99 is a perfect arrangement, because the buyer gets the kudos of being involved in modern art and I get £2.99. That’s cut-price nihilism, allowing people to get on with the real job of artistic enjoyment.”

Shirt is on a roll.

“There are now ready-made canvases in department stores. Art as décor. Mass produced. Pap Art, I call it,” he says, sparking up another roll-up for another sage thought.

“In a time when people have a spiritual hunger, and established religions have a lack of sustenance on that score, it means that art must become a spiritual thing and artists become shamen… so when Damien Hirst covers his skull with £50 million of diamonds and calls it For The Love Of God, I get upset.”

Shirt recovers his composure to draw attention to the work of fellow exhibitors.

“I thought the three would work really well as a combination because Hannah’s brooding landscapes are very traditional, Rory’s work is slightly left-field and my work is out on its own… absolutely cutting edge.”

We might never see his like again.

By Lacrosse Hunch-Hint

• Damien Shirt And Friends will run at the Norman Rea Gallery, Langwith College, University of York, from Monday’s 7.30pm preview to February 6. Exhibition opening hours will be 9am to 6pm daily. Rory Motion will give a talk at 7.30pm on January 26, because his alter-ego Damien Shirt “will have failed to turn up again”.

•Rory Motion and The Travelling Libraries play North Dalton Village Hall, near Driffield, tonight at 8pm; admission £5, concessions £3.