Not many artists divide opinion quite like Damien Hirst and, in this respect, the show in Tate Modern at the moment does not disappoint. Many critics have looked unfavourably upon it, or upon Hirst, in particular. Everyone’s favourite old art codger, Brian Sewell, unsurprisingly, can’t bear it, “this man’s imagination,” he writes, “is quite as dead as all the dead creatures here suspended in formaldehyde”. Even established broadsheet Lefties like the Guardian and the Observer don’t really enjoy themselves.
But some are more favourable, none more so than The Telegraph’s Andrew Graham-Dixon who awards the show five stars (out of five, just to clarify) and Rachel Campbell-Johnson of the Times, four stars.
For me, whenever I see his work or I read or hear people’s opinions of him, positive or negative, it evokes the same expression of emotion from me. Creeping across my face will forever be a smile. I’m not the only one. Watching the other exhibition attendees, they’re smiling too. They point to the vitrine with the severed cow’s head (A Thousand Years, 1990) decaying with flies and maggots, and with a grin, whisper to a friend about how disgusting it is. The vitrines (glass cages) serve to detach us from the fairly gross, but true, cyclical nature of what is happening inside them – in this case – being born, eating, breeding and dying. Without the vitrine, I don’t think anyone would be smiling; such would be the stench more than anything else.
When people smile it can be for a variety of reasons: most obviously because it’s a reflex reaction after something has stimulated their amusement, and Hirst’s achieves exactly that. There’s nothing remotely difficult to understand about the meaning of his work. There are no subtle undercurrents; in fact, all his currants are on the top of the bun, with icing. Death, death, death – yes, we can see you’re death-obsessed, Damien. What, I think, we find amusing is how his works have been so influential and how they continue to drive such high prices in the art market despite him being so open about his lack of physical involvement with them and his famous statement from the mid-Nineties, “I can’t wait to be in a position to make really bad art and get away with it”. Of course he enjoys a good joke with us, almost his entire career has been a joke aimed at self-righteousness in the art world.
One of my favourite explanations of Hirst’s success can be seen in the satirical comic Viz, where two self-righteous art critics, Natasha and Crispin Critic can be seen commenting at various pivotal moments throughout the career of Danny Tyke (A.K.A. Mr Hirst):
© John Fardell, Viz Comic, 2010
Later in the strip we see a reference to Hirst’s Spin Paintings (on display in Room 8 of the exhibition), where the Critics can be seen viewing Tyke’s Vomit Spirals 1-3 with £500,000 price tags, of which Natasha Critic says “Oh yes! By getting his team of studio assistants to vomit onto turntables to make swirly round random patterns of sick, young artist Danny Tyke has pioneered a daring new form of artistic expression, reinventing the whole concept of art for our age.”
To which Tyke replies “Obviously, I’m too busy with my accountant to do the vomiting myself, but it’s my concept, so all the pieces are authentic Danny Tykes”.
Watching the video of Hirst walking round the Tate Modern exhibition with curator Ann Gallagher, it’s uncannily similar to the Viz cartoon. It’s as if he can hardly be arsed to be there.
When looking at one of his seminal masterpieces, Mother and Child (Divided) 1993, “Were you consciously alluding to Christianity when you talked about the title being Mother and Child?” asks Gallagher.
“I mean Christianity, I don’t know about… I mean I was brought up as a Catholic till I was 12, all that stuff goes in there, but it’s difficult to, I mean I wasn’t directly. I wanted to sort of play with the view that if somebody says to me, ‘Is that religious?’ I’d be saying, ‘Well, what do you think?’”
Pfffffttt. What a farty load of arse.
And talking of a farty load of arse, “I did have an idea to do a huge bronze human shit”, he admits to Elizabeth Day from The Guardian, “40ft long, and call it ‘Untitled – No 2’.”
How can you not be amused by Damien Hirst?
Is he a genius? Despite the word’s overuse, of course he is – an artistic genius (shut up Sewell!) driven by entrepreneurial acumen. He has benefited from a fair amount of luck and good timing over his career; Mr Saatchi’s initial leg-up and the record-breaking £111m Sotheby’s sale, days before the 2008 recession, being most significant. But, as the saying goes, you make your own luck, and he heads an art and business empire that dominates the contemporary scene, rubbing his fiscal success in the face of his doubting critics, most visibly with his skull, For the Love of God (2007), encrusted with £50m worth of diamonds. Its open mouth laughs mockingly at both those who criticise him and, paradoxically, those who buy his work. The two fuel each other.
Critics can talk about how Hirst hasn’t come up with a decent new idea in over twenty years, and they’d be right, but they miss the point entirely. He’s reached his career goal of making bad art and getting away with it, and he’s happily now taking the piss, as anyone who saw his paintings in the Wallace Collection in 2009 will testify (although disappointingly they’ve been left out of this exhibition). If there was only one real disappointment with the exhibition, it’s that there wasn’t a surprise 40ft bronze shit at the end. Instead you just have to make do with a formaldehyde dove.
[Many thanks to TP guest writer, Daisy Bell, for sneaking me into the show’s preview]
By Edward Lines
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Great article here Ed.
In response to the comments from The Arts Antenna – I have been to see the crap by Hirst a few times over the years. Being a complete novice regarding anything arty and therefore being a member of the dumbed down public you refer to, I found Hirst very accessible.
My exposure to Hirst triggered a new interest in the arts more generally and I’ve since spent a large amount of time in other galleries the world over viewing art you’d presumably like and rate. I don’t suppose I’m alone in making that journey. Surely that’s a good thing for art more generally? I read the Very Hungry Caterpillar when I was younger, I’m now reading War and Peace. As they say, you’ve got to start somewhere!
I don’t understand this comment at all – “Genuine and profoundly inspirational works do not (by definition) create such an easy-to-market group buzz. Genuine inspiration is a personal, PRIVATE and even spiritual affair.” Can you explain which definition you refer to here? I’ve had a look and I can’t see any link between inspiration and privacy?
In contrary to your next paragraph, I think anything CAN have value if value is ascribed to it, working along the age of principle of supply and demand. ‘Can’ is the important word there in that snippet. It is an illogical move to then state that this means “there is no inherent value to anything.”
On to the next paragraph – do the public really finds it hard to judge illegal, genocidal wars? Weren’t there about a million people protesting against Iraq on the streets of London on a single day alone? Yes there are 60 million or so in the UK but they couldn’t all come out to protest, some of them have jobs.
In short then, getting thousands of people into a gallery is a fine achievement from Hirst that should be respected, even if he is laughing at us all.
Do you dislike Hirst just because he’s so popular and, well, it just ain’t cool to like things that eeeeeeeeeeeeeveryone likes?
Oooop, cat, pigeons, etc….
“…Can you explain which definition you refer to here? I’ve had a look and I can’t see any link between inspiration and privacy?…”
Yeah, sorry I didn’t express that very well. I was really talking about the fact that in the UK (and especially in London) art is so often promoted to the public as this kind of happy, clappy, interactive, fuzzy group experience with a very strong SOCIAL element.
You see this a lot with so called ‘interactive art’. A lot of this kind of art seems to be designed to feed the ego (not even the true ego but the ‘social persona’). One even has to be a bit of an extrovert (and a narcissist) just to participate in some of the interactive art installations I’ve witnessed here over the years.
Maybe that’s great for attracting the attention of your typical tourists and shoppers (yadda, yadda) but maybe it’s also a bit demeaning and patronising to the public and destructive for the arts (and ‘culture’) in the long term.
I’m not saying this kind of ‘social, buzzy, consensus art experience’ is always ‘bad or ‘wrong’ – just that there’s not a lot of contemplative, introspective, introverted, ‘quiet’ and ‘deep’ contemporary art out there to balance it all out…. plus it feeds into the whole celebrity artist thing (Hirst et al) where people only go to a gallery because there is a celebrity / media buzz about it.
It also sends the message to ‘young people’ that to get arts funding (and possibly even become a successful and rich contemporary artist) you need to be media friendly, ‘edgy’, shallow and ….. (gritted teeth)….. ‘accessible’.
After a few decades of this increasing trend we now have an arts world dominated by Hirsts and Emins and a million wannabes. So that’s good then. (sigh)
“…My exposure to Hirst triggered a new interest in the arts more generally and I’ve since spent a large amount of time in other galleries the world over viewing art you’d presumably like and rate. I don’t suppose I’m alone in making that journey. Surely that’s a good thing for art more generally? ..”
Actually I don’t see the correlation (often espoused) between visitor numbers to galleries and the state of the arts. I don’t particularly rate high brow art or visiting art galleries as the be-all-and-end-all either. They are essentially museums – of course they are wonderful, inspiring places in that respect (absolutely!), but art cannot thrive in galleries alone. Galleries are fuel gauges, they are not the fuel itself.
I actually take issue (perhaps controversially) with the idea that making art ‘accessible’ to the public is automatically a positive thing. I see it instead as a blatant indication of the inadequacies and even the harm done to children by government education. Government education makes children pig ignorant of ‘the Arts’…. but even worse it also stunts their creative, artistic, right brained, feminine, receptive, imaginative, non linear, creative (call it what you will) sides.
This is because all modern western schooling is based on the Prussian system (oh no, we’re back to Nazi Germany again!). The Prussian system used today was specifically developed to produce “a nation of obedient workers, not thinkers” (to paraphrase JD Rockefeller – who I believe also founded the NEA in the US). The Prussian system of schooling ensures the bulk of the population never develops their artistic, creative side, or their ability to think critically, or their ability to express themselves or understand the expression of others. The government is now forcibly drugging children who do not conform to this system. We are still very much living in the dark ages!
So making art more ‘accessible’ (more aligned with the rest of this deliberately dumbed down culture) is really just a part of that agenda. It represents surrender on our part and victory for the social engineers.
Imagine if the majority of the public was too overweight to climb stairs – would making buildings more ‘accessible’ by installing escalators everywhere be the right solution, or would raising our health to a much higher level be a better way forward? Obviously the latter, yet in terms of low standards in education ‘we’ are doing the former. ‘We’ are dumbing down our own culture to accommodate the (deliberate) deficiencies in education. Are you aware of the Hegelian Dialectic? That is the process by which society is currently being engineered.
Unfortunately we are just so conditioned to the double standards (and over so many generations) that we have come to accept them without thinking. Do the banks curtail their predatory lending to the third world to make themselves more ‘accessible’ to the concerned public? Do governments tone down their murderous wars or their parasitic taxation to make themselves more ‘accessible’ to the idealistic youth? Does Hollywood break ties with the Pentagon’s ‘Film Liaison Unit’ (propaganda division) because people are getting fed up watching endless violent, end of the world, ‘doom-porn’ with terrible scripts and the inevitable ‘violent military solutions = heroism’ propaganda messages?
I don’t think so! In this sense dumbing down art to make it ‘accessible’ is a *unique* as well as monstrous idea.
“…. I think anything CAN have value if value is ascribed to it, working along the age old principle of supply and demand….”
I don’t think you can’t really talk about supply and demand when the government controls education (by force) and when the government, to a large extent, controls arts funding (again by force). Only if people could freely choose how to educate their children (ie a free market in education services) and choose how to spend the entirety of their productivity (ie no taxation by force) could we then be able to talk about ‘supply and demand’.
How do you think government education would fair in a free market? How do you think spending on the arts would fair without forced taxation, relative to, say, spending on genocidal military adventures overseas or unnecessary quangos or advisory committees or detested political unions gifts of bailouts to criminal financial organisations?
“…do the public really finds it hard to judge illegal, genocidal wars?…”
You tell me. I don’t think the vast majority give it too much thought, and if they ever do they don’t really *feel* the death and suffering. Ask the average man on the street why ‘we’ went into Afghanistan or Iraq (or why ‘we’ are still there) and they’ll probably struggle to answer. I dealt with this subject more in my second comment FWIW.
Given that the mainstream media is obviously (and provably) controlled the only chance for us to express and share ideas and feelings about these wars is through the arts. Yet after a decade of the most despicable acts of inhumanity imaginable, why is it that the arts reflect so little in the way of a human response to it?
“….In short then, getting thousands of people into a gallery is a fine achievement…”
Why? Does art = gallery (no matter what that gallery contains)? … or is art something more abstract – a product or reflection of our current level of consciousness…. something which we must constantly define for ourselves…. lest others start to define it for us?
“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them.” John Ruskin
(in reply to Nick B)
‘I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. I’ve found out there aren’t any. I wanted to be stopped but no one will stop me.’ – Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst is an opportunist who benefits from the wave of destruction sweeping through contemporary art (and the arts in general) whereby value/ worth is being systematically and deliberately subverted, creating a false market and a dumbed down public who’s values are being eroded and twisted to create the perfect dumbed down, happy consumers AKA ‘sheeple’.
Galleries, critics and the media will not call this crap out for what it is because manufactured hype, ‘controversy’ and celebrity benefit them more in terms of immediate readership, advertising, merchandising, visitor numbers etc. Although it inevitably destroys (interest in) the arts in the long term.
Genuine and profoundly inspirational works do not (by definition) create such an easy-to-market group buzz. Genuine inspiration is a personal, PRIVATE and even spiritual affair. To be inspired by great art is the reward itself. There is very little else to say or write (and then sell) about it.
The consumerism-friendly idea which has been aggressively promoted in art over the last few decades is that anything can have value if value is ascribed to it (essentially through marketing). IOW there is no inherent value to anything. We are taught that ascribed value is always valid, inherent value is an illusion.
This mindset has now permeated our entire culture over several generations. And it has subverted our attitudes about everything – from architecture to relationships to morality. The public finds it hard to judge illegal, genocidal wars or criminal collusion between governments and banks NOT because they can’t tell right from wrong, but because they’ve been conditioned over successive generations to view right and wrong as existing side by side…. just as a pile of bricks can now exist alongside a Monet….. “Who are we to impose value judgements?” …. “It’s all relative” etc
This mindset – this weakness of mind and spirit! – is as dangerous as it is idiotic.
In the end Damien Hirst is no more or less than a measure of OUR failure as art critics, as gallery trudgers and as supposedly sentient beings with imagination, integrity and soul.
Certainly an interesting point of view there, The Arts Antenna, and I’m not sure many have linked Damien Hirst with genocidal wars before!
I can imagine you going through the exhibition with a big scowl on your face.
“… I’m not sure many have linked Damien Hirst with genocidal wars before!”
Well then, perhaps it’s time somebody did!
I do not deny Hirst is ‘of his time’ – but what interests me the most is trying to understand how and why this time has ended up being defined in the way it has, not least through (so called) ‘artists’ like Hirst.
For me, putting Hirst’s work in the context of real life is the most rewarding way to look at it. His works are, after all, mostly *conceptual* pieces. They exist just as much in our minds as much as they do in a gallery (or in a glass box). They invite thought…
One context we can place Hirst’s work in (together with the overblown hype it is given) is that of a country which has been dragged into genocidal war(s) for a decade now. The rulers who got us into these wars have already been charged with war crimes in a tribunal under the Geneva Convention. Despite this, and during the greatest financial crisis in history, we (the public) are STILL being forced to pay for a war which costs approximately $3000 a second and which has slaughtered at least a million and displaced at least 4 million civilians and caused unfathomable environmental damage (depleted uranium etc). A war which shows no sign of ever ending, despite the war’s official narrative claiming the two main ‘baddies’ have been murdered.
Meanwhile back home, the most terrifying high tech Orwellian surveillance society imaginable is being set up (again at the taxpayer’s expense, during an economic collapse), while the rights and liberties are being stripped from the public at a truly alarming rate by the same agency which refuses to end the genocidal wars which it started and which have long since been proved to be illegal and based on lies …..and all of this is being done (we are told) to counter a supposed threat (‘terrorism’) which, even if valid, claims less lives than accidents involving stepladders, statistically speaking.
Meanwhile, as the bodies pile up, as the war debt grows and grows and as the rest of the horrors continue, the art world continues to celebrate artists who routinely deal with death in the most titillating, clinical, schoolboy-ish way (just a more expensive version of pulling the wings of flies or magnifying the sun onto ants mentality). If the theme isn’t death it’s most likely just narcissism and trivia (Emin’s unmade beds and boyfriends I’ve slept with etc etc etc).
Now, we can argue all day long (until the pickled cows come home) about the how’s and why’s (the causes and effects, the chicken and eggs)…. but to me it seems respectful to Art to at the very least *acknowledge* this connection.
In more concise terms: Art has never been so devoid of moral or aesthetic value and so lacking in artistry …while at the same time this country (along with much of the industrialised west) has never been so fully engaged in acts of destructive, murderous violence and all round evil.
The question I suppose is: is that a worthwhile link to make? Do art and current events share any connection at all? Or are they completely separate universes? And if it’s the latter, then what is the point / value of art?!
Perhaps art has indeed become (as I suggested) little more than a consumer affair these days. A (deliberate?) distraction to keep us from feeling real emotions… to lead us *away* from making moral or aesthetic or any other kind of genuine heartfelt value judgements… perhaps to discourage us from extending that ability and that habit and making heartfelt value judgements about real world events.
Let’s not forget that the circumstances which brought Hitler to power (I know, I know I’ve just brought Hitler into the conversation as well now! What am I like!?) were: a collapse of the economic system and mass unemployment which led to the rise of corporate fascism, the perceived (propagandised) threat of ‘terrorism’ from overseas (as well as ‘homegrown terrorists’) all leading to the rise of the Third Reich which the German people (in fear, impoverished and perceiving an outside enemy which did not really exist) were easily persuaded to VOTE into power.
Does any of that resonate with what’s happening today? I think so. The only real difference was that in Germany the state took control of the corporations, whereas today the corporations are taking control of the state. But the effects are largely the same on the ground. Both are the very definition of corporate fascism.
So here’s something to think about. Suppose during the time of Hitler’s unfathomably democratic rise to power and the aggressive militarism and genocide that followed, the art galleries of Berlin had been full of dead, sliced up animals in formaldehyde or severed heads with flies …. interspersed with the occasional picture consisting of coloured circles on a white background (or whatever). Looking back through history might we be tempted to make a connection between the clinical, narcissistic, aloof, death-obsessed art of the time and the social/ political nightmare manifesting itself as Nazi Germany?
I think it would be hard not to see a connection, rightly or wrongly.
No doubt the majority of the German gallery goers of the time would be completely oblivious to anything disturbing going on inside or outside the galleries….. just as most of us are today…
“…I can imagine you going through the exhibition with a big scowl on your face….”
Not at all ….well maybe a bit
I do find Hirst’s work very stimulating, even though I rate it all as junk. It’s all the hype and his subsequent popularity (in the context I have just explained) which I find so disturbing. The works themselves are kind of inconsequential to me. They are like that weird death/ violence obsessed artwork which 11- 14 year old boys sometimes draw in school exercise books before their hormones have fully kicked in and they become obsessed with sex….. except that Damien Hirst is supposed to be a grown up.
I agree. Did you like the butterfly room?
xxx
Hi Billy,
Yes, his early Nineties formaldehyde works are brilliant. Especially when put in context of the BSE crisis at the time, hundreds of cows around the country being slaughtered – horrific death on a vast scale and despite his critics saying it’s all too obvious, these works remain iconic and enduring. Put crassly, this was good art or a good idea which allowed him the freedom to go on and make bad art as he wished. Whether it is actually good or bad art is another matter.
Hi Eddie.
Mother and Child (Divided) 1993? With the cow chopped in half, and an almost full grown fetus sitting it it’s mothers womb? Did you not find that quite moving – I thought that was really gut wrenching! I was almost quite upset! Is that bad art? I think it’s effective.
xxx