[Marxism] Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Guardian, Saturday September 13 2008
by Robert Hughes

Day of the dead

Amid the controversy surrounding the Sotheby's auction, Robert Hughes 
explains why he has taken a stand against Damien Hirst's 
'simple-minded' works, and an art world where prices bear no relation to talent

By now, with the enormous hype that has been spun around it, there 
probably isn't an earthworm between John O'Groats and Land's End that 
hasn't heard about the auction of Damien Hirst's work at Sotheby's on 
Monday and Tuesday - the special character of the event being that 
the artist is offering the work directly for sale, not through a 
dealer. This, of course, is persiflage. 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.

If there is anything special about this event, it lies in 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, from museum 
personnel such as Tate's Nicholas Serota to billionaires in the New 
York real-estate trade, into giving credence to his originality and 
the importance of his "ideas". This skill at manipulation is his real 
success as an artist. He has manoeuvred himself into the sweet spot 
where wannabe collectors, no matter how dumb (indeed, the dumber the 
better), feel somehow ignorable without a Hirst or two.

Actually, the presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of 
dullness of taste. What serious person could want those collages of 
dead butterflies, which are nothing more than replays of Victorian 
decor? What is there to those empty spin paintings, enlarged versions 
of the pseudo-art made in funfairs? Who can look for long at his 
silly sub-Bridget Riley spot paintings, or at the pointless 
imitations of drug bottles on pharmacy shelves? No wonder so many 
business big-shots go for Hirst: 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's 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. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform 
message from our fin-de-siècle decadence.

Hirst's fatuous religious references don't hurt either. "Beautiful 
Inside My Head Forever", the sale is titled. One might as well be in 
Forest Lawn, contemplating a loved one - which, in effect, Hirst's 
embalmed dumb friends are, bisected though they may be. Consider the 
Golden Calf in this auction, pickled, with a gold disc on its head 
and its hoofs made of real gold. For these bozos, gold is religion, 
Volpone-style. "Good morning to the day; and next, my gold! Open the 
shrine, that I may see my saint!"

His far-famed shark with its pretentious title, The Physical 
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is "nature" for 
those who have no conception of nature, in whose life nature plays no 
real part except as a shallow emblem, a still from Jaws. It might 
have had a little more point if Hirst had caught it himself. But of 
course he didn't and couldn't; the job was done by a pro fisherman in 
Australia, and paid for by Charles Saatchi, that untiring patron of 
the briefly new.

The publicity over the shark created the illusion that danger had 
somehow been confronted by Hirst, and come swimming into the gallery, 
gnashing its incisors. Having caught a few large sharks myself off 
Sydney, Montauk and elsewhere, and seen quite a few more over a 
lifetime of recreational fishing, I am underwhelmed by the blither 
and rubbish churned out by critics, publicists and other art-world 
denizens about Hirst's fish and the existential risks it allegedly symbolises.

One might as well get excited about seeing a dead halibut on a slab 
in Harrods food hall. Living sharks are among the most beautiful 
creatures in the world, but the idea that the American hedge fund 
broker Steve Cohen, out of a hypnotised form of culture-snobbery, 
would pay an alleged $12m for a third of a tonne of shark, far gone 
in decay, is so risible that it beggars the imagination. As for the 
implied danger, it is worth remembering that the number of people 
recorded as killed by sharks worldwide in 2007 was exactly one. By 
comparison, a housefly is a ravening murderous beast. Maybe Hirst 
should pickle one, and throw in a magnifying glass or two.

Of course, $12m would be nothing to Cohen, but the thought of paying 
that price for a rotten fish is an outright obscenity. And there are 
plenty more where it came from. 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. Inert, wretched and wrinkled, and already 
leaking the telltale juices of its decay, it is a dismal trophy of - 
what? Nothing beyond the fatuity of art-world greed. The Met should 
be ashamed. If this is the way America's greatest museum brings 
itself into line with late modernist decadence, then heaven help it, 
for the god Neptune will not.

The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping 
art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the 
unverifiable claims about its cash value, and 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 made into 100cm x 
75cm silkscreen prints and then sprinkled (yay, Tinkerbell, go for 
it!) with diamond dust, and to charge an outrageous $10,000 each for 
them. The edition size is 250. You do the maths. But, given the 
tastes of the collectoriat, he may well get away with this - in the 
short run. Even if his auction makes the expected tonne of money, it 
will bid fair to be one of the less interesting cultural events of 2008.


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