Damien Hirst: The Great Busisnessman 2008

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 15^th and 16^th 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.

Michael Craig-Martin

Late in November, I went with Carol to see the Michael Craig-Martin retrospective at IMMA Had Carol not been so keen to see it I probably would not have gone. Craig-Martin dubbed the Godfather of Brit art, taught such artists as Damien Hirst in Goldsmiths Art College, and it was easy to see what a seminal influence he had been on artists of that generation.  He was a monkey-see-monkey-do conceptual artist – borrowing and stealing the ideas of others freely. Craig-Martins conceptual sculptures of the 1970s formed and consolidated many of the conceptual innovations of the 1970s - which for better or worse had formed the lingua-franca of the art world. What surprised me about his retrospective was its depth and quality, and its diversity of ideas.                                   

I had expected to hate it, but in fact I found quite a lot to admire, and I was glad Carol had dragged me along. But what depressed me about it, was the realization, that success in the art world, gave one the ability to inflate and make claims for ones work impossible to the failed or unfashionable talent. Entering IMMA's beautiful courtyard I discovered its entire lower flower covered in one long continues print of one of Craig-Martins colourful collections of household objects, drawn in outline only and overlapping each other. All I could think was: “How much did this cost to make, and install? And who paid for it?”                                                                                   

Craig-Martins work plagiarized many of the key ideas of 1960-70s art. One of the key victims of this had been Patrick Caulfield, whose colourful pop arty paintings of ordinary objects; Craig-Martin had converted into colourful overlapping line drawings of ordinary objects. Many of these canvases were beautiful to look at and very well made. However, Craig-Martin had also hijacked Duchamp's use of ready-mades, Sol LeWitts use of wall drawings, Warhol's use of designed wallpaper with painted canvases placed over it, and so it went on and on. Elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Brice Marden and others whose work, Craig-Martin seemed to convert into conceptual variations. I would have to have had specialist knowledge of conceptualist history to know just how grave these various acts of appropriation were, but I frankly could not give a dam.                                                                                                                

Overall, what struck me most was the use of conceptualized pastiche. One normally thinks of painting or sculpture when one thinks of pastiche, but Craig-Martin had adopted a newish strategy of taking the works of others and giving them his own conceptual-sculptural take. The most witty and effective of these for me were his Blinds, which seemed to convert the Minimal canvases of the likes of Brice Marden into muted coloured blinds, opened or closed to various degrees. Thus allowing each artwork to incorporate an almost endless element of variation. This idea of variation underlined most of Craig-Martin’s work and was seen at its best in his computer light boxes in which his illustrated day-glow objects emerged and disappeared randomly according to a computer program.                 

                                                                                                                     

In many ways Craig-Martin’s exhibition, was an ideal show for art students. For it showed how with unstinting diligence, money, self-belief and the neck to steal anything from anyone, one could make interesting art about just about anything. One did not have to have technical genius, or emotional depth or anything in particular to say about the world. One merely had to make (or have professionally made) objects of some craft and professionalism, on any subject what so ever, no matter how banal (in fact for institutional support, the more banal the better), but above all else – respect and work within the framework of the institutional and academic system. Craig-Martin’s work I felt had not and never would change the world, but it had and would cause a murmur within the walls of contemporary art institutions – a game of minor aesthetic delight for those who thought art was nothing more than an intellectual trivial pursuit.   

                                                              

The self deception and cultish insularity of the institutional art world was summed up for me when I entered one of the rooms that held Craig-Martin’s infamous sculpture Oak Tree which was a glass half-full of water on a glass shelve about eight feet high up on a wall, with a plague with a conceptual interview in which Craig-Martin asserted his right to describe it as an oak-tree. “Oh look there’s the glass of water that’s an Oak tree!” I chuckled to my girlfriend. “No it is an oak tree!” The invigilator exclaimed to me. “Oh right.” I murmured, not wishing to talk to her. “It is an Oak Tree! Read the sign!” She haughtily proclaimed. I had no desire to tell her I had seen the ‘Oak Tree’ in the Tate in London in 1996, or that I thought it was utter bullshit. Instead, I dutifully read the conceptual sign that accompanied the glass of water on a shelf and moved on. But as I did my spine shivered with the same kind of disgust that had filled me, when I had been forced to sit through Catholic mass and go along with the religious delusion that wafer and wine were in fact the body and blood of Christ. I frankly couldn’t care less if Craig-Martin chose to make the artistic point that whatever the artist claimed was art – was art. I certainly did not think it an original statement; it was in fact just another pastiche this time of Duchamp and Kosuth. But I did mind being told what to think by some snotty nosed gallery intern. The art world could claim anything they wanted to be art, but I and everyone else had the absolute right to deny it was art, or that we thought it to be part of a very smug, pseudo-intellectual, irrational and boring kind.                                                                        

 The truth about art I had come to believe was – that there was no eternal meaning to it, it’s grand theories were largely obscure, elitist and subject to fashion, and it had little or no power to effect any kind of change in society. Art was nothing more than a mode of communication – part of a cultural exchange. Sometimes it connected profoundly with its audience (as it had done in the work of artists like Raphael, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Rothko and Warhol) but most of the time it was nothing more than a form of wall filler, decoration and distraction – a form of amusement. Great art works formed part of a visual debate about existence, and as in any debate some ideas and expressions were more convincing than others. It was the right and duty of every artist to pursue their art to the fullest, but there was no entitlement on the part of their audience to accept their work as profound, meaningful, and beautiful or something that could enrich their lives. I could see how Craig-Martin’s work would be highly instructive to young art students, conceptual artists and even graphic designers, but for me it had no meaning to my work.                                                

Before we left I.M.M.A we quickly went around Irish Art of the 1970s which proved to be a very strong representation of Modern Irish art, but also a store house of artistic ideas and styles now redundant. Le Broquey was represented by some of his strongest works, which reminded me that he did in fact have some small talent.

But my favourite work of the whole day was the photographic work Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll (2004) by Vic Muniz in the Hearth exhibition downstairs. This photograph consisted of the image of a girl made up of hundreds of brightly coloured children’s toys on a white background. From a distance it looked like a beautiful Fauvist cum Pointillist painting, but up close one delighted in seeing all the different kinds of children’s toys that were piled up to form the shape of the girl. The meaning of the work was further deepened by being based on one of Lewis Carrol’s Victorian photographs of young girls (in this case Alice Liddell) which with my day’s concern for children were controversial to say the least. However, the full implications of this choice of image, was beyond me at the time – all I marvelled at was the cleverness and beauty of the way the image was made. Not only was it a beautiful image it was also smart and knowing in the best Post-Modern sense – summing up as it wittily did so many of the ideas of modernist representation and Post-Modern re-representation.

I Love Tracey Emin

The following day in the pits of depression I watched The South Bank Show documentary on Tracey Emin with Carol. I loved the documentary and so did Carol who then spent the following two days reading every book related to Emin in my library. The Documentary was released at the end of January 2005, but I only decided to watched it a year later. I had had an immense love/hate interest in Emin for nearly ten years. In some ways our work was similar or came from a similar need to express private 'truths' in our art. In an art world awash with professionals of the most boring kind, Emin stood out because of her extrovert personality and guts to create the art her psyche demanded without censorship. In fact it was this rawness, lack of irony, and lack of professional calculation which made her work stand out from the sea of machine made, impersonal and utterly academic theory bound art of my day. There were literally hundreds of thousands of artists making this kind of academic art that was utterly lifeless, over designed and pompously blown up with ill digested theory - but there was only one Tracey Emin. To attack her for not being able to paint or draw (which even I thought she was hopeless at) or for being too personal and too much of a celebrity was to miss the point entirely. You could have put a camera in front of 90% of contemporary artists and just send people to sleep or reaching for their remote controls. Tracey on the other hand was real, raw, untutored, honest and had the common touch. As a person and as an artist she connected with people on a level that was never condescending or obscure. Damien Hirst was without doubt a better artist - but he just acted the drunken bore droning on humourlessly about death. Whereas Tracey's conversation had many levels; serious, funny, rude, sad, or pathetic. Identity art had been around for nearly twenty years, but it had mostly been made by people with no identity worth knowing. In many respects Tracey's art was very feminine, and much of the abuse she had received had been because of the preconceptions/ prejudices people unconsciously had about women. Her work taunted the viewers to expose their bigotry, and invariably she succeeded. Tracey's earthy commonness exposed the art world for the snobbish, elitist and bigoted world it actual was. Most artists, curators and collectors live mundane lives the main thrust of which is social climbing. Artists have for centuries used art to social climb, they follow strict rules of etiquette laid down by the upper classes and they manage their careers with all the cunning of a reader of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Tracey's art and life were a spit in the face of such narrow minded uncreative pompous bores. She was right when she said - she was her own best creation. In fact it was Tracey the person, not really Tracey the artist who beguiled me so much. In an art world run by bureaucrats, accountants, knaves, lick arses, and actors - she was real. It is true that many of the formal aspects of her work was derived by from artists like Munch, Kahlo, Beuys, Basquiat, Nauman, and Lucas to just name a few of her influences. But her sheer force of personality made these influences her own, and in many cases make her influences look like pale imitations. I loved Tracey, just for being Tracey.                                                                                                   

Tracey Emin The Feminist Capitalist

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

Sigmund Freud

In mid March 2006, I watched What Price Art on channel 4, in which Tracey Emin explored the issue of the prices fetched by women artists in comparison to male artists. In the 1970s courses like Women's Studies propagated endless thesis and later biographies on neglected female artists. Those artists it highlighted Artemisia Gentileschi, Gwen John, Modersohn-Becker, and Frida Kahlo were good third-rate artists but not geniuses - you could easily pick a hundred forgotten male artists just as good if not better. It is a cold fact that the history of art is 99.999% dominated by dead white male western artists. This fact is a subject of intense outrage by people less interested in art and more interested in the gender, race, and religion of artists than in the actual quality of the art they make. In The Obstacle Race Germane Greer studied the history of female artists and concluded that while art history was full of female child prodigies - they never lived up to their early promise. The 1970s and 1980s saw a spate of women only exhibitions, which only further ghettoized women, and since most of the art exhibited was rubbish it did nothing to promote the cause of respect for women artists. Camille Paglia famously declared in Sexual Persona that there would never be a female genius like Mozart because there were not blood-lust killers like Jake the Ripper. Genius like psychopathic blood-lust killing she claimed was a peculiarly male phenomenon. Paglia claimed that feminist excuses for a lack of geniuses - like social neglect, prejudice or motherhood - were irrelevant because many great male artists faced prejudice, neglect, poverty and derision. I thought it was far too early in female emancipation to agree with this. And already many strong female artists had emerged like Louise Bourgeois and Paula Rego. But what really annoyed me about Tracey's utterly self serving and self-obsessed documentary  - was its reduction of art to money  - spawned as it was by her own anger that the likes of Damien Hirst's work sold for higher prices than her own. However, to me it was self evident that Hirst was an infinitely better artist than Emin and more importantly he was a far greater curator and promoter of the London Art scene. As far as I could tell, Emin had done nothing but promote herself and her art relentlessly for the past twenty years. Hirst on the other hand had worked in collaboration with others artists, and began his life as a curator of others artists work. Hirst along with Saatchi and Joplin made the London sense - Tracey just crashed it and screamed for attention.