Amidst
the biggest unfolding financial crisis in a life-time – the worst since the
Wall Street Crash of 1929 - Damien Hirst took the biggest gamble of his career.
He decided to go above the commercial galleries and sell his work directly to
buyers at an auction at Sothbeys on Bond Street in London - in a show entitled
‘Beautiful inside My Head Forever’.
By taking his new work direct to auction he claimed he was cutting out the
middlemen of the commercial galleries and dealers including his own The White Cube and Gagosian. Hirst portrayed himself as a liberator of artists from
dealers. Yet at the auction many of the works were bought or bid up by Jay
Jopling of The White Cube – which
represented Hirst – yet another example of
dealers and insiders manipulating the market for their own ends. Months after
the auction rumours also emerged that some buyers had renegade on their
purchases.
When
I first saw Hirst’s work in 1990 - I was convinced of his amazing talent and
promise. Yet by 1992, I had already begun to suspect Hirst of vulgar
commercialism. I thought he should have won the Turner prize in 1992 – and I
was enraged when (the now totally forgotten bore) Grenville Davie won it. I
cheered when Hirst won the Turner prize in 1995. However, I felt that the Sensation exhibition in late 1997 - had
finished of the yBa’s as creatively daring and challenging artists. With
growing sickness I watched them go on to produce increasingly commercial,
tacky, gaudy, grandiose, soulless and factory made art. They became pop-stars
not artists, businessmen and women not creators, alcoholic networking whores
not self-questioning interrogators of meaning. A damming indictment of Hirst to
me was the utter forgettability of his actual art works. While first writing
this piece on him I totally forgot I had seen his work three times in I.M.M.A
in the mid to late 1990s. Yet I clearly remembered Jeff Koons when he was in
similar shows.
For weeks approaching Hirst’s auction - I read reviews of the
forthcoming auction. About 80% of the reviews were critical of Hirst’s inflated
reputation - though nearly all agreed that Hirst would make a killing. I was
praying that Hirst would fall flat on his feet. His special kind of egotism,
megalomania and greed - I felt deserved a vicious stripping down.
However my hopes were completely
dashed. On the 15th and 16th of September 223 lots -
paintings and sculptures by Hirst were auctioned to the highest bidder. Hirst
sold £111 million pounds worth of art in the space of two days. After Sothbeys’
commission was paid – Hirst was able to personally pocket £95.7, (all of these
figures come from reports in The
Guardian, The Times, The Independent and
The Telegraph published in September 2008.)
The sale set a new record for an entire
auction devoted to one artist – beating a sale of Picasso’s works in 1993. Even
I had to take my hat off to Hirst the master media manipulator and businessman
who amid the carnage of Melt-Down Monday
on the stock markets, the collapse of investment banks and doom-laden talk of
recession – had timed his end of the boom sale perfectly. I also had to take my
hat off to Frank Dunphy his North Dublin accountant who had masterminded many
of Hirst’s coups including the Sothebys sale.
The centrepiece of
the Sothebys auction was The Golden Calf, a cow in formaldehyde,
with gold plated horns and hooves - in a gold plated tank. Like For The Love of God, it was a big money
spit in the face - of art as an object of; pleasure, contemplation, critical
thinking or liberation. I was reminded of Freud’s observations on the anal link
between gold and faeces. It was emblematic of an art world reduced to
meaningless media shock-tactics, uber-rich house decoration and vulgar
assertions of vanity – both Hirst’s own and his supporters. It went for £10.3 -
lower than its estimate – but sickening all the same.
As
critics like John Berger and Andrew Graham Dixon have pointed out, art in the
1500s, became something completely different from the pious reflections of
primitives, the symbols of power and the tools of propaganda of earlier times -
it also became a commodity and a source of pleasure in and of itself. Something
to covet and contemplate, exchange and act as a new, super-commodity - as
tradable as gold, silver, precious stones or spices.
Art was bought, sold and collected
in the early years of modernism – but never on a significant scale. Before
modernism, individual artists like Titian and Rubens had run huge studios,
amassed vast personal fortunes - and counted amongst their friends - most of
the nobility of Europe. Still these were largely exceptional cases.
The modern ultra-commodification
of art only really began in the 1960s – with artists like Andy Warhol and his
‘factory’ approach to art-making. He went on to influence artists of the
following generation like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.
Thus, commodification began to have
an increasing impact on the nature of the work produced in the art world in the
1960s – either with an attempted seduction of the market as in Pop Art - or in
a critical rejection of it – like in early forms of conceptual art in the 1970s.
The public still admired tragic
artists like van Gogh because they were thought to have had integrity and
suffered for their art – however in the professional galleries it became the
age of the ultra-commercial operator and Neo-Salon decorator.
In this new market place, art
students straight out of collage were not given time to broaden and deepen
their work – instead they were encouraged to come up quickly with a saleable,
instantly recognizable gimmicks. Many artists were overnight sensations and
then within three years totally forgotten. Success had to be achieved early and
then quickly consolidated in museum retrospectives - before the new wave of art
students had arrived on the scene. Hirst the businessman had survived all these
trials of fashion and the market but as an artist he was dead in the water.
Personally, Hirst the artist had
lost all significance for me in the late 1990s when he substituted artistic
risk-taking and innovation for the mercenary production of ever larger, more
gaudy and expensively made versions of his four main staples; animals in
formaldehyde, spot paintings, butterfly collage/paintings and spin paintings.
The great concept of Hirst was the ‘me-too’ concept. He simply rehashed old
conceptual ideas in a more spectacular way.
Unlike Jeff Koons who had come before Hirst (and influenced him
profoundly), Hirst failed to significantly develop and broaden his art. All he
did was enlarge it to greedy and arrogant scales that almost made me sick with
their waste of money and human labour.
Hirst constantly droned on about how
interested he was in mortality, death and old-fashioned existential meaning.
However all his fear of death had done was driven him to ‘immortalize’ himself
in gold, diamonds, marble and through the dead bodies of countless poor
animals. He was no Samuel Beckett – he was more like a drunk, clownish bore in
a pub. When modern artists (I could not even be bothered to flatter him with
the company of the old masters) like Picasso, Rothko and Warhol plunged into
the depths of the human condition, the frailty of life, the fear of death, the
loss of faith, the hope for meaning – they produced works of profound feeling
and intellectual sophistication. They made work that repaid revisiting. Hirst
achieved none of this - all he could offer was gimmicks made thumping brand
logos.
Before the Sothebys
auction in 2008 it was Hirst’s sculpture For
The Love of God (2007) - a
diamond encrusted platinum cast of a human skull – that epitomized for me the vulgarizing of his and all
contemporary art perfectly. With it Hirst played a trick so hackneyed it was
taught within the first few weeks to first year Art Students. Take an object –
and alter it through collage, or recasting in order to at least double its
supposed meaning. Yet again all Hirst proved - was that he had too much money
for his own good. After it ‘sold’ for £50 million in 2007 - it later transpired
that Hirst had bought a third of the work himself. The other two thirds - were
bought by an unknown investment company. There was nothing new in this – it
only served to prove yet again how rigged the art market was. When For the Love of God - was hailed by many
in the art world as the most important work of the year – I was left feeling
revolted by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of this age of surplus, greed
and selfishness. The complete spinelessness of most of the newspaper, art magazine
and media critics made me even sicker than Mr Hirst. He was just a con-man –
but they were all suckers.
With
sculptures like his diamond-incrusted skull in 2007 and the The Golden Calf – Hirst was having his
cake and eating it. He could pretend the
works were a mocking commentary on the greed of the Noughties while at the same
time acting like a gluttonous pig in its trough.
Hirst the businessman had become the
only interesting thing about his career. He had a massive country house in
Gloucestershire, houses in Mayfair London and in total Dunphy thought that
Hirst owned up to 40 houses. Added to this was his collection of Modern art -
which included works by Warhol, Bacon and many of his peers - which was valued
at over £200 million. In early 2008 – The
Sunday Times ‘Rich-List’ had put
his value at over £200 million. After the auction he was estimated to be worth
over £600 million – putting him up there with the top hundred-and-fifty richest
people in Britain. Yet no one it seemed to really know for sure what Hirst’s
true worth was - especially as it was so heavily based on the stability and
astronomical rises in the art market.
While
99% of artists in the world (including myself) painted in their tiny homes or a
small grotty studio – hand-making their own paintings, sculptures and
installations - Hirst ran over five huge studios divided between London, Devon
and Gloucestershire - staffed by 180 assistants. In a world, were everything
had a price, it saddened me to think of these assistants committing creative
suicide for the sake of about €20 an hour. Exactly what kind of skilled but
servile artists and crafts people choose to work for the likes of Koons and
Hirst baffled me. Art for me was about personal freedom not indentured
servitude. He was reported to have produced over 4,000 works by 2008 – many of
which were so expensive and dependent on technicians, factories, foundries and
workers to make - that an artist like me had absolutely no chance of ever
making even one of them. That is of course if I had been so vain - as to want
to make them - which I did not. Hirst himself admitted that he had only ever
painted five spot paintings himself. Because he said, "I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it.” Even describing his
own efforts as "shite.” He went
on to say: "They're shit compared to
... the best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She's brilliant.
Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one
painted by Rachel.” (Hirst, Damien and Burn, Gordon, On the Way to Work. London: Faber, 2001.) Personally, I would have
felt ashamed and emasculated to think that others - employed for pay - could
make my art better than me.
As you can guess – I was bitter. However even if I had been granted the fortune Hirst had been given – I knew I would never had been so utterly crass and egotistical. For instance in 2004 - I had bought an animal hide on a stall in Madrid. It was a spur-of-the-moment buy - which I almost instantly, felt guilty making. In 2006, I collaged the skin into three self-portrait paintings – and that was the end to my use of animals for my own aesthetic glorification. As for assistants – I would have almost killed myself at the thought that my canvases - could have been claimed even fractionally by others.