Thursday, September 11, 2008
Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst was meeting and greeting his buyers at Sotheby's yesterday. Smart move. One art man told me the auction next Monday will account for 90 per cent of the turnover in next week's world art market. Only Hirst could pull off this direct to auction stunt. There have been equally popular artists before - Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Augustus John, Graham Sutherland, David Hockney - but Hirst lives in a world of hot money and hot media so the stakes are much higher. Walking round Sotheby's yesterday I was oppressively aware of the philistine power of sheer wealth. As Michael Craig-Martin said to me a while ago, the one thing you can say about the contemporary art world is that it is not Bohemian. But I was also oppressively aware of something I've noticed before - Hirst is a pre-modern artist, to be precise he is a Victorian artist. This has been evident from the beginning when his interminable variations on the theme of the memento mori quite clearly echoed those edifying pre-Raphaelite message paintings. Equally, his use of glass cases with formidably engineered frames for his sharks etc echoed the display cases in the Natural History Museum. And, finally, his decorative butterfly and spin paintings are almost absurdly Victorian-domestic - look at Paradise. At its best this nineteenth century style produces undemanding, pleasantly decorative effects; at its worst it produces the most astounding vulgarity. It's a long time since I saw anything quite as crass in a serious exhibition as Transience. This is kitsch for the rich. Hirst's genius lies in his acute sense of the market. These works make his rich patrons feel safe. Either they look simply nice or they wear their meanings on their sleeves. How can they go wrong, even at these prices? But, if you fear all this sugared gold is making you fat, go round the corner to Cork Street and the Bernard Jacobson Gallery. There you can see an an exhibition of difficult, beautiful works by William Tillyer, a real artist who couldn't enslave himself to the market if his life depended on it.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Absolutely right on all points
ReplyDeletei know very little about art, and less about modern art, but what i've glimpsed of Emin & Hirst reminds me of Eliot's lines:
ReplyDeletewhat are the roots that clutch
what branches grow out of this stony rubbish
Son of Man you cannot say or guess
for you know only a heap of broken images
i guess for Eliot this sense of brokenness, rubbish, decay, was matter for an incandescent despair; for Hirst et al it seems a reflex, on a par with complaining about the weather or what have you. It's utterly exhausted, there isn't even despair or horror left, just a great deal of money.
The jewelled skull thing put me in mind of Antigone, the prohibition against disinterring the dead. It summed up Hirst for me, grubbing around in the decay and ruin for sensation, and hence money. And all these rich folk and art critics applauding, they may as well have been gibbering: "bar bar bar bar bar", as the Greeks heard all tongues save their own (the jewelled barbarians).
I wish Damien all the best with his venture, I was just listening to a feature on his life and work on radio 4 who implied although Daimien was passionate about Religion he didn't believe in God. Which he also found a frustrating paradox. I define God, that is a very religion independent artifact, as a largely unknown being, and religions are essentially a celebration of this largely unknown being, therefore if Damien accepts that we don't know everything, and consequently the unknown exists, and the Unknown is essentially what God is, then Damien does actually believe in God. ( The largely Unknown being ). Keep the faith. Mike.
ReplyDeleteI wish Damien all the best with his venture, I was just listening to a feature on his life and work on radio 4 who implied although Daimien was passionate about Religion he didn't believe in God. Which he also found a frustrating paradox. I define God, that is a very religion independent artifact, as a largely unknown being, and religions are essentially a celebration of this largely unknown being, therefore if Damien accepts that we don't know everything, and consequently the unknown exists, and the Unknown is essentially what God is, then Damien does actually believe in God. ( The largely Unknown being ). Keep the faith. Mike.
ReplyDeletethe "memento mori" could be a recurrent idea and theme in the art of artists like Damien Hirst, Maquiamelo, Bacon, Dino Valls.
ReplyDeletethe presence of death still life in the Damien Hirst Skull, Maquiamelo`s Tsantsas, Bacon Popes and all the mistery work of Dino Valls.
Jackie Wildenstein
Art Critic