The post below was written over 12 years ago but Damien Hirst continues to irritate the whole wide world with his approach to his art and making money.
Dear Jeremy Paxman,
The recent and utterly predictable furore about Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern has so far unsuccessfully (on the BBC at least) tried floating the same old questions when you’re talking about Hirst and his ilk: is it art? Is it any good? And hidden behind those questions – often poorly masquerading as intelligent criticism Jeremy – is the punter’s stealth bombing attitude that is appalled at the economy that surrounds Hirst. He makes money. Tut. He makes tons of money. Tut tut. He bypasses the traditional dealers and sells dead flies to rich foreigners. Tut tut bloody tut.
The question of whether or not Hirst’s oeuvre is ‘art’ is as dead a question as that shark in the formaldehyde. It just stares at you, demanding you look directly into its mouth and be scared, be very scared that you get the wrong answer. Worse, be prepared for your flimsy swimming costume of a rationale for what constitutes art will be torn from your human flesh, exposing you in all your idiotic posturing. No, the question of whether something is art or not just generates un-ending trails of snail mucus which never answer the question (because its always the wrong question) and just serve to reinforce the critic’s own habits predilections and prejudices. The slime trail wends its way slowly, inexorably over the ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ tautology.
The more significant question about Hirst is what our concern about his earning capacity tells us about what we expect from our artists; how they behave, how they should look and what place in society they should feel content to inhabit. Our concern and sometime hostility to his relationship with the arts markets suggests not so much that we’re are appalled that his spot paintings generate a million times their value every time he adds another row of pastel spots, but that he has the nerve to make any money at all. Artists surely do what they do because they love it? They’re driven by a vocational call that has nothing to do with filthy lucre? Surely they should be living in hovels, surrounded by the dead cows they carve up with their chain saws: not living off their profits?
Clearly, artists shouldn’t be linked to the word profit at all. Their place in the world should be at the altar – or better still, in the kitchen gallery ready to be poached, fried or plain old skewered on our prejudices that artists should be poor, anonymous and plain old dead before they’re entitled to benefit from the madness that is the arts marketplace and the market in general.
Hirst will only really have ‘made it’ once he dies and leaves instructions in his will for his own body to be drenched in formaldehyde and then strung up on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. When that happens Jeremy, you and your colleagues will no doubt be leading the campaign for the sanctification of Hirst because as you know, the only great artist is a dead one.
Number 1 in the series Write an Open Letter to a Famous Person!
drnickombe 