‘Hirst is basically a pirate’
I said I wasn’t going to post anything further about Damien Hirst, but when someone with the heft of Robert Hughes steps forward to explain why, who can resist?
I still shudder at Hughes’ ill-considered dismissal as valueless everything Dali did after 1939 , but in an article for the Guardian headlined “Day of the dead”, about the mid-September Hirst auction at Sotheby’s, he certainly hits nails on heads.
He begins by pointing out the nonsense in promoting the auction as “special” simply because Hirst was selling his work directly for sale, rather than through a dealer.
“Christie’s and Sotheby’s are now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers anyway: they in effect manage and represent living artists, and the Hirst auction is merely another step in cutting gallery dealers out of the loop.”
All that was special about the sale, he continues, was “the extreme disproportion between Hirst’s expected prices and his actual talent”.
“Hirst is basically a pirate, and his skill is shown by the way in which he has managed to bluff so many art-related people … into giving credence to his originality and the importance of his ‘ideas’.”
Hirst’s collages of dead butterflies are “nothing more than replays of Victorian decor”, the empty spin paintings just “enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs”.
“His work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free. Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons’ balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stoned scribbles, Richard Prince’s feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols.”
Of the most famous shark since Jaws, in which fawning critics see a symbol of existential risk, “one might as well get excited about seeing a dead halibut on a slab in Harrods food hall”.
“The idea that the American hedge-fund broker Steve Cohen, out of a hypnotised form of culture-snobbery, would pay an alleged $12 million for a third of a tonne of shark, far gone in decay, is so risible that it beggars the imagination,” Hughes writes.
“For future customers, Hirst has a number of smaller sharks waiting in large refrigerators, and one of them is currently on show in its tank of formalin in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art … a dismal trophy of — what? Nothing beyond the fatuity of art-world greed.”
Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull is “a letdown unless you … are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.
“It certainly suggests where Hirst’s own cranium is that his latest trick with the skull is to show photos of the thing in London’s White Cube gallery, just ordinary photo reproductions … and then sprinkled with diamond dust, and to charge an outrageous $10,000 each for them.”
Seven years earlier, the same newspaper was reporting that Emmanuel Asare, a cleaner at London’s Eyestorm gallery, had failed to realise that the pile of old paint pots, plastic cups, used ashtrays, buckets and a stool he found was a £5,000 work of art by Hirst.
“As soon as I clapped eyes on it I sighed, because there was so much mess,” Asare said.
The whole assemblage was chucked in the bin, where the staff found it before it was hauled off to the municipal scrap heap. Working from photos of the installation, they carefully put everything back as it was, not a cigarette butt out of place.
But, the Guardian quipped, “would a Leonardo still be a Leonardo if someone else had applied the paint? A troubled public needs to know: is this Hirst just reproduction rubbish or the real thing?”
ALSO: In the Times, Waldemar Januszczak tears a strip off the Tate in “Pompous, arrogant and past it?” (The question mark must have been the editor’s idea.)
