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.
the emperor has no clothes
ReplyDeleteSounds like a Paris Hilton trinket... there's a sucker born every minute.
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