Damien Hirst

[poliphilo]

Damien Hurst has a thirty foot statue on exhibition in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. It's modelled on Degas' Little Dancer, only Hirst's dancer is pregnant and one half of her has been flayed, exposing her bones and the child in her womb.

It's the sort of thing Dali might have done (and how old hat is that?) only Dali would have been less literal and more dreamlike-  more genuinely odd. 

Dali got a bad press for chasing the dollar, but that was then and this is now and Hirst- a country house-dwelling multi-millionaire- gets little but respect for what he does.

I'm not saying  Hirst's a phoney; things like his pickled shark and bisected cow have established themselves as modern icons; but his work has always been a bit obvious, a bit vulgar, a bit fairground freak-show (like Dali's) and all the signs are he's run out of ideas. 

And so (still like Dali) he's gone for excess and scale. The flayed dancer is a dull idea and making it totally ginormous doesn't hide the poverty of inspiration. His latest project is reported to be a plantinum skull encrusted all over with diamonds.  

A platinum skull encrusted with diamonds.  I can see it in my mind's eye. It's a image from an unwritten Jacobean play (probably by John Webster). Cool.  Now lets talk about something else.  

You're not actually going to bother to make it, are you?

Dali, too, in his final phase, turned to jewellery.

Comments

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Art is just that... art...
You can love it, or hate it. It's all in your own perspective.
But it is still that... just art.

I see lots of stuff I don't like too.

The exhibit I saw with a chair made out of real rotting meat turned my stomach! (and the stomach of the poor museum guard that had to stand near it!) The stool topped with a sponge cake was amusing though... oh yes... and there were the crickets eating the bread inside of a box...

Don't take any of it too seriously please?

Oh... One of the Dali exhibits that I found very amusing years ago featured a real car with plants inside and water dripping all over it! I have no idea what the point of it was, but I still remember! *L*
Oh wait... it was SURREAL. That was the point!

If people buy Damien's work... that is their problem... no? *L*

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Oh... by the way...
I HAVE actually seen Damien's work. One of the exhibits that my 8th graders went to see had one of his first "pieces" in it... a whole sheep in a box of formaldehyde. You can imagine their reactions! :-)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I quite like Damien's early stuff. But he's a one-trick pony, I think, and nothing he's done recently equals the visceral impact of those dead sheep and cows and sharks.

[mummm.livejournal.com]

It does seem that many of them do not show improvement with age doesn't it?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Most artists who improve, improve because they become technically more proficient. But Hirst is essentially a conceptual artist who gets craftsmen to execute his plans and so that route isn't really open to him.

Besides, how do you improve on a dead sheep?

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Ha! I see your point.

[mummm.livejournal.com]

You slice it into sections... *L*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And serve with mint sauce?

[mummm.livejournal.com]

*giggle*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've seen that car with the water dripping inside it. Fun!

You're right; there's no point in getting all worked up. It's just that most of what's getting shouted about today seems to me to be simply ripping off stuff that was new and exciting about 50 and (in some cases) 100 years ago.

[mummm.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely right there!

Have you seen the work of Moriko Mori?

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Or Sandy Skoglund? Or Nam June Pak? (spelling on the last name looks wrong), or (recently passed away) Ed Paschke? Chuck Close?

Those are SOME of my favorite contemporary artists.

I've met Sandy and Ed in person... they are/were super people, and Chuck is my idol! (you have to read about him as a person to understand why)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

All these names are new to me. I'll have to do some googling :)

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Never heard of him. So I googled and found this:

http://www.wirednewyork.com/art/damien_hirst_virgin_mother.jpg

Bleah.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Bleah and yawn.....

[mummm.livejournal.com]

(shhhh... I kinda like that one... DON'T TELL!)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My lips are sealed.

I just think it's kinda obvious.

[amritarosa.livejournal.com]

A focus on ornament generally signals the beginning of a decadent phanse...

Not that that's a bad thing- a lot of what I make is ornament. And I love Huysmans, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Just a thing I noticed.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I love those guys too.

I think Hirst's latest work is decadent- which is fine. What gets me is that it's just not very interesting.

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

It's sort of a "movie prop art": it's intended for a few fleeting seconds in the peripheral vision or to be hidden in the dark until the climax.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's it exactly.

A sudden frisson- and its interest is exhausted.

[treehavn.livejournal.com]

Actually I think you've hit the nail on the head. The statue was never so impressive as when you walk past the wonderful elaborate gates of the RSA and see the big black lady in the courtyard within. Further inspection just confirmed that, yes, it is a really big sculpture.

[treehavn.livejournal.com]

We were at the RSA yesterday and saw the Hirst sculpture. There were some people who were gawping at it, but I couldn't really get much more from it than looking and saying 'yes, that is a very big statue'. It doesn't help that he called it The Virgin Mother or some such; although it's big and quite impressive for that reason, I don't necessarily think it's particularly clever.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The title- Virgin Mother- doesn't illuminate the statue. It just adds a modish touch of sacrilege.

Hirst is so terribly adolescent.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

This one has a grotesque beauty about it but most artists seem to forget that art must be beautiful or it is merely truth.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My favourite quote from any artist is one of Picasso's- "Run ahead of beauty".