SO LONG, FAREWELL, GOODBYE

Why is the son of Satan always named Damien? It's so bloody tiresome.

And speaking of tiresome, this will be the last time I write about this oaf. After a while ragging on a subject over and over is as pointless and dreary as writing about it each time a bird craps on the car.

Damien Hirst, gad. Great Britain's art equivalent to a high school fart joke. Thief and supporter and apologist for the 9-11 terrorists (he offered them his congratulations), he has finally cut loose his 2008 "For Heaven's Sake." No doubt held back these three years while the market rose to restore the comfort level of his fans. (He had to buy his last effort himself.) This next earth shaking "objet d' qu'est-ce que foutre!?" is another sadder version of an earlier sparkly skull. It's one of his queerest (and most disingenuous) pocket-lining decoupage projects. In his own words, "If you get away with bad art it's good art," and "I'm no genius, just lucky." Your lips to God's ear!

He is the grubby hero of rich has-been rock stars fading into pock marked junkies who pass the lazy days blowing guys in public toilets. His coterie seek to recast respectable names for themselves as serious patrons and important collectors. They and those like them buy self aggrandizement by paying any bizarre price for the meaningless and juvenile musings of a former high school smart ass. You remember this guy. We all had one at some point....a free-range grunt whose trademark was to piss into the trash can in the back of the classroom to make the guys laugh.

His pretense, as artist, is to rediscover the "beauty and fragility" of life - and pointing out the gross vulgarity of society. To him that means hiring people to do everything for him, wouldn't want to get tangled up in actually making art, now. His new stroke is farming out the application of beaucoup bucks worth of glitter on a human baby's skull. He picked it up years ago in an estate collection of 19th century medical specimens. In his peculiar reality paving deadbaby with diamonds was just the ticket. A damning commentary by one pure and brave, wise, unflinchingly mirroring society's shallow materialism. Bold and steely eyed honesty from a mechanic's son Moses pointing down from a holy mount of cash. "Woe unto you, for you sin a great sin in your over-spending, vanity and pompous ways!" Damien sucks hard at the teat of the top drawer market of vapid, materialist sycophants. Cleverly hawking his own boorish, vapid and materialist crafts directly to those he curses. Pretty sharp! Elmer Gantry pretends to be artist (while his staff of 150 do any actual work).

But, no, not an artist. This is a crafts designer. A fashion designer. A carny. A puffed, doughy leach made flabby from sucking off the limitless vulgarity of his nouveau-riche clientele. But, finally, just a gauche designer sucking cash off a clique within the art collecting community as deep as cellophane and horny for acknowledgement.

His intellectual cowardliness is numbing. His hands are unsullied by his own work. In his silly and pretentious biology class stunt "St Sebastian," a still-born baby bull was decoratively pickered with oh-so-grisly looking and artified jet-black arrows (designed to be thicker than normal arrows for that extra dramatic punch). He hadn't the balls to be part of the society he pretends to accuse and take the animal's life himself. If you're going to be a swine then do it. Be a real bastard. But he's too much bourgeoisie, too squeamish to demonstrate the brutality he accuses the rest of society of by strangling the baby bull. Neither did he murder the animal by tying it down to hammer arrows into the writhing, howling creature. He sent a servant out who bought a limp, silent meat market carcass and carefully had someone else decorate it with faux arrows and then string it up in a tub of pickle juice. At least the otherwise forgettable Adres Serrano actually pissed on the crucifix he accused us of desecrating. So, other than his own shallow greed and his marketing team and collectors...who exactly is he accusing? Only himself, his agents and his own vapid collectors, that's who.

It is not excess displayed by "society," as Damien hypocritically pretends. It's only the manipulative, soulless emptiness and rank hubris of himself and those hollow creatures drawn to him. It's truly a brilliant marketing strategy. Say your work condemns the emptiness of ...anyone crass enough to buy your work.

He proves at most a teenage angst designer, a high-end glue-gun crafts hobbyist taking a child's skull, sending it off to a jeweler with the instruction to pave the thing, and make it pricey dammit! A shiny little tchotchke to go on a coffee table. You know, like you'd buy at any furniture outlet. Except this is for the high-end design mart shopper. Every little diamond numbered, counted by color, and platinum, not that common gold, and loads of the shit! His fumy design born of boredom and avarice cobbled by some nameless schmo in a jewelry workshop. And for what? Faaaabulousness! Thousands of diamonds screwed onto some nobody's dead baby's skull. "Noboddaddy's" child. And so a righteous (hungry) Damien points an accusatory finger at....well, at himself and his brassy, haute groupies who think a showy purchase could make them valid entities in the art world, respectable, cerebral. Sadly, they're right about that.

Ultimately, though, this kind of work will not stand in art history to damningly point an accusing finger at society. It will be seen for what it is - an odd, expensive decoration. It's accusatory digit will always only point directly at the craven, obsequiousness - the shallow avarice of the artist who made it and the tinselly folk who paid his fee.

These over-wrought, grotesque ornaments are not a symbol of the failure of society. They are, however, the essence and emblem of the debasing of fine art by a strictly cash-driven art industry moved by hucksters and art-carnies. It is a new more rigid and brittle, hide bound Academy - the Academy of the cash drawer. Money alone validates work. . . in the short term.

Art, authentic art, has - will always serve to draw society, individuals toward a greater depth of being. We expand emotionally, intellectually, our sense of spirit increases through the seeing, the knowing of art objects of deep, great meaning. And, yes, sometimes hideous, dark in their beauty - and their beauty may only be in their cruelly unflinching truth and intensity of thought and the vibrations left by the artist's touch.

But, these currently fashionable glittery, faux-terrible trifles serve only one purpose in art and its history- to draw the dull and crass kitsch mavens to write ever fatter cheques in a pointless attempt to buy their way out of their own intellectual toilet. Sad. They themselves are the social collapse they bemoan and today's art discourse is the poorer for their wealth of folly.

NON SUM QUALIS ERAM

They die in tiny steps. Some days greater leaps. One lid no longer opens as brightly as the other eye's. The words of still delightful conversation often made thick and slurred by tongues forgetting their skill. She phones five times in ten minutes to ask the same simple question and to say "just thinking of you." When we hug goodbye she always whispers "I love you" as if to help me store the phrase for the coming time when she will no longer remember who I am.

His stoicism and sharpness are eroding to a softer, almost boyish round-edged affability. He dotes on her. Once a gruff and surly husband now become devoted servant, secretary, housekeep. He makes her milkshakes with hidden doses of protein and calories to slow the evaporation of her muscles. He plays a game of grouchily demanding she remember this or that, slyly coaching her to refuse to become resigned to forgetfulness. He demands she continue to fight this already lost war until there's nothing left. They strive to push back against the inevitable for as long as possible. Soon the day will come when even her muscles forget, forget how to walk, how to chew, even to swallow. But for now it's time to fight and keep the bastard back. Even if by millimeters keep back the goddamn thief that will sooner or later steal one of them from the other. Knowing, too, that one of them won't know no matter who is taken first.

They rise with pain, bent, walk with a small, weaving gait that still carries a faint sheen of the polish and pride of coming from two proud ancient lines. Their bodies bend more and more over time, but not their dignity.

Broken skin, numberless spots and causeless wounds now lay siege to her once delicate face. Still, the blemishes of age have not yet fully breached the soft, thin skin above her cheeks. Her eyes can still flash an imperious, scolding glance or earnest, childlike want. When something unwelcome is said they still wound with shocking immediacy. But death's power of imminent domain is always laying claim, marking its increase with the spotty toe prints of infiltrating demise, clawing toward her lids, annexing the once pale, ivory, silken skin around her eyes, eyes that could always soothe or savage with the slightest shift of her mood.

He goes to bed early. He escapes in sleep the grinding endless end that is unfolding. And alone he rises in the darkness before dawn to sip coffee and read the paper while she sleeps later and later each morning. Last month she left a small foot stool in the middle of the floor. No reason. Before she went to bed the stool just came to mind and so needed to be brought out. In the dark the next morning he tripped on it, fell full on his head. Five small gashes, a concussion, maybe a small fracture and bleeder. But, "it is nothing and no I won't go to the goddamn Dr."

So I watch him during each day's visit. Watch behind our chatter for signs of an emergency. He is afraid. Afraid he may have to be hospitalized. Afraid that she will not have him for a day or even two. He knows she will dissolve into panicked terror. We've seen it before during a dawn to midnight hospital stay for his eye surgery. Even though I stayed with her every minute, sat with her at the hospital, would've slept at their house, his absence was horror itself. Her confusion instantaneous. The hours before his surgery, the wait during. She became more and more afraid, even hostile. "Why are we here? Where is this place?" Soothing words, distracting questions about long dead relatives brought quick laughter, but, only distracted for a moment, a moment that shrank more with each passing moment. She clutched my hand and said "You're my good scout" a dozen times. A second later almost wailing, desperate to bolt, and yet even more terrified by not knowing where to run or why.

When she is sick in the ER I hold her head and coo "this is normal, try to relax into it" when the morphine makes her vomit. I slip her boney hand, delicate, transparent skin above blue veins and tendons, under my shirt when the IV solution makes her so cold her hand and arm ache like they're broken. I speak with a calm and cheerful lie of panic when I call the nurse in to control her pulse and plummeting pressure. As if to reassure him I wink at my father who is rubbing her always freezing feet and pressing them against his belly. Though calm and placid to others I see him numb with desperate terror. He is nearly deaf and the isolation adds to his horror. I am there to hear for him. I corner the haughty Dr who ignored her nurse and then my questions. I berate him for his ignorance and sullen, casual disregard. He's upset his Fourth of July has been interrupted. I bully him. I have him barred from the hospital when he asks if I'd "prefer her conscious or knocked out while she's at home."

I think of my secret muse. The goddess faced one. A friend I have only met in notes exchanged. I think of her and her own friend who would've died alone but for the night-long race to reach her before the last breath. She held her friend's hand, hugged her body close while she died. My lovely muse spent herself, drained herself of all she had to spend the last hours of a life in stories and laughter and songs and sadness. She came to her friend whose own ugly children ignored her. Petulant fools made bitter by some meaningless bruise they chose to treasure up and are now made irreparably poor, shabby, odious.

And after it all, and now "it" is every day in one form or another, after it all I paint. I paint and I beg the color to rise and sharpen. I push back to ponder and stare and curse my own illness and pain and fatigue. I plead with the paint to rise to the intensity I want to feel. I am rich with life because I am cursed with the great good fortune to be the one who gets to be here, to see, to help my parents die as well as they deserve. I'll draw on these foul, sweet days of ending for as long as I paint. And I hate it. And I am grateful for it.