Sotheby’s recently auctioned Damien Hirst’s latest collection and raised … £111 million.
That’s a lot of moolah for works that included a bull in a tank (golden hooves and horns apparently referencing the Golden Hind), butterflies stuck in paint and some, admittedly pretty, spot paintings.
BabbelOn would like to share with art loving readers images of the objects in question, but in a move that says it all really, the Sotheby’s web-site catalogue teases with no more that little boxes saying ”Image under artist’s copyright”. Brave readers can risk litigation by viewing the works here.
The auction result, which must make Hirst surely the wealthiest artist in history, raises a number of obvious questions for BabbelOn; “Has the world gone completely mad?” being at the top of the list. Also in there are; “Is Damien Hirst an artist?” and “Does bullsh*t artist count?”
Can any art really be worth that much? If you believe in the wisdom of free markets, by definition art is worth whatever a bunch of Russian oligarchs are prepared to pay for it. It is also hard to deny that in the current global financial climate, a zebra in formaldehyde is probably a safer investment than anything Wall Street might be flogging. It also makes for interesting client to private banker conversations: “Sherman? Vlad here. Liquidate banks and get me some of zose liquid zebras.”
Hirst probably isn’t the richest artist around, that honour being held by Steven Spielberg or Paul McCartney. However, one can imagine Picasso or Van Gogh revolving in their tombs and cursing the cruel twist of timing that put them in the right place at the wrong time. (Having just checked on the INTERNET, BabbelOn can report that Hirst is reputedly worth US$1 billion. Spielberg is worth US$2.6 billion and is in fact topped by George Lucas at US$3 billion. That’s a lot of popcorn.)
The fact that Hirst has a staff of 200 shouldn’t be held against him. Warhol had his factory and the old masters couldn’t have produced their enormous back catalogues without apprentices filling in the sky for them. Apparently Dali signed blank canvases for years as if they were blank cheques. There is however something dodgy about an artist who produces with so patent an eye on his market. It is hard to imagine his studio being filled with sketchbooks, little wooden models and half finished pieces. Easier to picture is him on the phone to his dealer in Shanghai testing the market for one of his turds dipped in gold.
The £100M question remains – is what Hirst does art? The critics are apparently divided. Robert Hughes and Matthew Collings think it’s tacky crap. Germaine Greer apparently quite likes Damo’s work, although BabbelOn feels it is always germane to note that Germaine, like Damien, seems more interested in controversy than content.
Damo returned fire at Hughes, claiming that:
“Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, I think they were all thinking about the commercial aspects of art. I believe I’m only doing what any of these artists would be doing if they were alive.”
Fair enough but BabbelOn would be prepared to wager that this is the only time the names Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya and Hirst will ever appear in the same sentence.
Damo’s last foray into creative immortality was the provocatively titled “For the Love of God” a diamond encrusted platinum skull, for which the asking price was a mere £50 million. With the benefit of (golden) hindsight, this little offering could be seen as a taster, something to get the punters talking before the main show, to get the Russians calling their private bankers and moving the coffee tables out of the way.
BabbelOn’s cynicism is heightened by the knowledge that the “buyers” of the skull included none other than one D Hirst, his manager and his dealer.
Just what is Hirst’s work saying anyway? BabbelOn would not pretend to begin to answer that question but it just cries out for some analysis. Let’s take the diamond skull (not to be confused with Spielberg’s latest work).
The human skull has been a symbolic presence in still life for hundreds of years, signifying mortality. Diamonds, on the other hand, scream immortality and the immutability of the inorganic. Hirst’s work therefore sets up a frisson between the human and the artificial, the natural world (albeit rendered in platinum) and the manufactured. He may also be saying that life is cheap, with imagery of skulls often associated with genocide. Bejewelling a skull with £20 million worth of diamonds rather overmakes the point. A one carat solitaire in the middle of the forehead would have said as much (and also adds a certain religous sub-text BabbelOn is quite taken by).
A case can therefore be made for “For the Love of God” as saying something artistic (not least about art and commerce, although presumably not even Hirst is cynical enough to admit that).
BabbelOn is not pretentious enough to suggest that Hirst is not an artist. At the very least, one can imagine punters lining up (apparently 28,000 turned up for his latest show) and saying “I know what I like, and I like that pickled foal.”
BabbelOn will, however, go so far as to predict that, in addition to some puzzled Russian grandchildren who will inherit objets d’art that may prove difficult to shift on Ebay, Hirst’s artistic legacy will place him somewhere between the Chapman Brothers and Jeff Koons.
Hirst might put it a different way. In an interview in the front of the official exhibition catalogue for his 2006 Moscow show, he explained:
“I’m operating at the top end of the art world. So I can come in and you’re not going to think ‘It’s a f***ing birthday card. So I can take a birthday card and re-represent it to you, and you’re gonna go ‘F***ing hell, that’s gotta be important if it’s been put here.”
Indeed.
