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.

David McDermott and Peter McGough in IMMA

I went on Tuesday 5th of February with Carol and Stephen - to the opening of An Experience of Amusing Chemistry: Photogrpahs 1990-1890 by David McDermott and Peter McGough in IMMA The two Americans who are now in their mid fifties - had emerged in the early 1980s as part of the East Village scene in New York. In an age of mannerism, pastiche and neo-this-and-neo-that - they went even further into the regurgitation of the past by living their life as though they were in the early 1890s. I suppose in this they were strangely more honest than their peers. They wore (somewhat tatty and thread-bare) vintage suits from the 1890s, photographed themselves in their Spartan studio in arch poses that recalled the eccentricity of early photographers and their subjects - and also signed their paintings with dates that came decades before they were even born.                                                            

  

As you know, I had meet David McDermott many times in Dublin – but then who hadn’t. He was a very nice man – very funny, very camp, very gay, very outgoing, very eccentric and unusually honest for the art world. But as artists we couldn’t have been further apart. He had no phone, electricity or modern gadgets in his home – which I visited once. But at the opening I saw Peter McGough had a digital camera circa 2007 - which he quickly hid in his pocket!                          

Their show was of vintage style photographs of themselves and their friends taken with old plate cameras and developed using arcane print techniques like Salt-Prints, Cyanotypes, Palladium Prints and Gum Bichromates. The poses recalled early homoerotic erotica, nineteenth century Dandies, and Christian iconography. Basically, lounging young men in summer linens, looking mournful and interesting.                                                                                                 

Like with their previous show in IMMA in 1998 they went all out to impress with their professionalism and perfectionism. Instead of the usual wine there was Moet Champagne, there was a very expensive catalogue (at €58 it was too much for a fickle fan like me) as well as two forms of giveaway texts. In order to get the lighting as close to daylight as possible (it was a dark cold February night) they hired a lighting company to shine spotlights in the windows of the galleries from outside. Inside they displayed their photographs in black and gold frames hung high and low and in banks as was fashionable in the early 1900s. In the centre of the rooms they had the large old plate cameras - which they had used - and the walls of the first room was hand painted to look like Victorian wallpaper. I respected this attention to detail and professionalism - and found their early rather amateurish photographs from the 1980s (oops should that be the 1880s) charming and funny. However, I found the later photographs more mannered and banal.                                              

Ultimately, I could not see the point of any of it. I too found myself becoming nostalgic – but for the good old days of the religious painters or even the Abstract-Expressionists – when art really did aspire to something greater than the recording of the trivial and theatrical lives of artists – but then who was I to talk! However compared to the art students they inspired in the noughties - McDermott & McGough were practically old masters.                                               

Alice Maher and Ellen Gallagher

In October 2007, I saw - two important exhibitions of art by women in Dublin. Usually I would not even bother going to these - but Carol as an art student naturally loved female artists. Apart from a few decent artists like Kahlo, O'Keeffe, Bourgeois, Rego, Emin and Gallagher - I had no real interest in women's art. Their concerns were not my concerns, their styles are not my favourites and their over-hyped political promotion made me sick. However, I didn't hate their work anymore than that of 99% of all the male artists I knew.

           

I am had by now become reluctant to write about these shows because I either felt fatigued at the prospect - or I was worried about the knee-jerk emails from women in response to my personal opinions and jokes. In my experience my readers would listen to me berating male artists work for pages - but if I said boo to a female artist – in their eyes I was a meat eating, war mongering, racist and misogynist. It was all so juvenile, humourless and the product of self-interest - for me ever to respond to these attacks.

             

If there was a theme running through my whole writing on art it at this time – it was a belief that there was such a thing as great art - usually because of history that meant male artists - but every year - more and more genuinely great female artists were emerging. On Internet sites like deviantart and mypace - I had found far more talented up and coming female artists than men - in fact, it was a eight to two ratio. Moreover I adored that fact that my girlfriend was such a talented and passionate graphic designer and by then a fine art student - and I loved being able to give her advice and support her art. There was no sex war in our house we both thought it all a joke.

             

So anyway on the first weekend of October - I went with my girlfriend to The National Gallery of Ireland - were we saw a wonderful exhibition of portrait drawings. Gems by Antonio Pollaiuolo, Francesco Bonsignori, Jean-Dominique Ingres, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Adolf Menzel, Augustus John and William Orpen and Paul Klee delighted us both. This was real drawing, real art and real skill and imagination at work. However, I could not say the same for the Alice Maher's exhibition of charcoal and pencil drawings at the RHA.

             

The Night Garden by Maher - was an exhibition inspired by Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Maher had been exhibiting in Ireland and abroad since the 1990s - to some minor success.

             

Putting aside the smug hubris of this woman to think herself an interpreter of Bosch - the show was poster and wallpaper art of the most boring and contrived kind. I was sure she was a lovely woman, I was sure she was sincere, I was sure she was very clever - but a true artist born to create? I thought not. I thought art was merely an easy social option for her. She had talent - but no real originality or passion. It was all too similar to the art made by countless female professors of fine art in art schools across the Western World - dry, derivative, smug, and myopic.

             

As usual, her work was well made, well meaning, diligent but utterly lacking even a flicker of the-sacred-fire. There was no mystery or originality in Maher’s work - just cliché. Her black and white drawings in charcoal and the various works inspired by them seemed far too similar to the greater and more original drawings of Francesco Clemente who had practically reinvented the symbolic figure in Western art in the late 1970s (after a prolonged silencing of the language of the body by abstract art and conceptualism.) However, Maher's work had none of the beauty or enigma of the Italian. Once again Maher's work struck me as academic, contrived and riddled with a rag-bag of Feminist art clichés (long female hair, animals, breasts, breast feeding, menstruation, the moon, the sun, plant forms and so on) derived from more original and heartfelt artists like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois. It was looking at works like these that made me quite happy not to write for a newspaper - and be forced to write about artists like Maher.

             

You know I saw the original Bosch painting in the Prado in 2004 - it is big (it’s about eight feet high and seven and a half feet wide when it is side panels are closed over) and it had burned into my very soul and set my pulse racing. It is quite simply one of the greatest paintings I have ever seen. Bosch’s depiction of male and female nudes is skilful and delightful, his painting of animals entrancing, his musical instruments and grotesque but stylish monsters enigmatic, his colours are so strong and evocative, and the whole panel teems with minute details and beasts conjured from his imagination. A man or woman could sit and look at this painting for an hour a day till they died - and still find new mysteries, details and insights. It took me a brisk walk around of ten minutes to drain Maher's work of all its aesthetic interest. The Bosch painting was an Atom-Bomb of a painting still radiating after nearly five centuries - in contrast Maher's brand-new vast charcoal work (taking up practically the whole of the RHA) was an unexploded dud!

            

Then on the bank holiday weekend at the tail end of October - we went to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane to see Coral Cities - an exhibition of paintings, collages and craved paper by Ellen Gallagher. Carol was a huge fan of Gallagher's work since it had so many elements of collage in it - for it was my girlfriend’s first love.

             

However, I went with my critical dagger drawn ready to cut her down to size. I suspected that Ellen Gallagher - a beautiful mixed race American (her mother Irish American her absent father an African American) was nothing more than a mascot for a politically correct art world - more concerned with identity than artistic quality. Add to that the growing tendency of Irish museums to rope in any major artist abroad with the vaguest link to Ireland - and you might understand my scepticism.

             

When I had seen her work in reproduction it had looked like timid, boring, art-school stuff. But I had never had a chance to see her work in reality - and that I was soon to learn - was crucial to judging Gallagher's art.

             

As we entered the first room, my heart sank as I looked around and saw large apparently blank white sheets of watercolour paper. However, as I got up close to them my heart jumped for joy. She had cut and carved into the paper - creating highly detailed and well-drawn (or well-carved) images of fish, octopuses and African women's heads with wild flowing hair. In my experience, there are few artists whose work reproduces so badly in print. That is no reflection on the skills of her photographers - merely an indication of how subtle her effects are.

             

These works were quite simply some of the most beautiful, gentle, inventive and skilled contemporary work on paper I have seen in years. I had such a compelling desire to gently run my fingers over her carved, cut, water-coloured and collaged works on high quality watercolour paper. I wanted to share a drink with her - and just listen to her talk. Like a great flirt - Gallagher knew how to say just enough to gain your interest - and had the control to leave you waiting in baited breath - for more.

             

If you wanted me to get heavy handed - I could have said that work dealt with themes of African American women's desire to look white or the subtle forms of self-racism the oppressed sometimes inflict upon themselves. However, that would make her work sound too rhetorical and aggressive. Looking at her work, I was reminded of the wise and softly spoken poetry of Mya Angelo - not the aggressive heroics of Jean-Michel Basquiat or the Feminist screaming of The Guerrilla Girls.

             

Some art works shout at you - Gallagher's whisper to you: "Come here I want to tell you a secret.” Her work reminded me of Georgian flower and plant watercolours, Outsider art, Marlene Dumas watercolour nudes, Chris Ofili's intricately patterned and collaged paintings and many other female artists interested in natural forms and female identity like Nancy Spero. However, at no time did I feel she was pastishing or plagiarizing others - her own vision was consistent throughout. Yes, her art was identity art - but she had so much more to say about life than just what colour her skin was. I quickly sheathed my weapon and bowed in homage.

             

Gallagher's work had a wonderfully obsessive and secretive quality. There was none of the tedious narcissism of Tracey Emin, none of the boring repetition of Rachel Whiteread, none of the bogus Feminist rant of Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer and none of the attention seeking of well - take your pick of exhibitionist female artists of my day. Although Gallagher had private schooling and a fairly easy road to the top of the New York art world (in 1995 she was shown in the Whitney Biennial - aged only thirty - and two years later she was a Gagosian artist) I felt her art was truly self-driven and not reliant on the world around her - I knew that success or failure would not stop her need to create.

             

After we had gone around the show once - Carol pleaded: "Do you want to go around again?" "Yes sure!" I replied. So we looked over the work afresh - still enthralled by this wonderful woman's discrete and highly skilled works. Was she a great artist up there with the best of the past twenty years - I thought so - but then that didn’t really say much. These days were truly awful times for contemporary art.  However, I looked forward to watching her understated and very intelligent and compassionate art develop.