otics may lead to future antibiotic-resistant infec - Kuwait Times

FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2012
Arts
is more powerful than money’
collection Beautiful Inside My Head Forever
(2008), which includes a zebra, a unicorn and
a golden calf. There are pristine steel and
glass cabinets full of neatly arranged pills, and
evil-looking black paintings made of thousands
of flies congealed in paint.
There are spin paintings with and without
human skulls at their centre, and spot paintings
that move between the vibrant and the
purely ambient. There are more flies, live
ones, hatched from maggots and feeding off
a severed cow’s head in a vitrine, and butterflies,
pinned and painted and pressed on canvas,
and a single white dove suspended in
mid-flight above a human skull. Life and
death, beauty and ugliness, the sacred and
the profane; all the big Hirstian statements
that have appalled some critics with their supposed
obviousness, but have also dragged
conceptualism from the margins of the art
world into the mainstream.
Outside Tate Modern will stand Hymn
(1999), Hirst’s monumental take on a child’s
educational figure, complete with exposed
stomach organs. Inside, in the massive
Turbine Hall, flanked by security guards, will
sit a relatively tiny piece entitled For the Love
of God (2007), the most expensive work of art
ever created in terms of its materials: a human
skull cast in platinum and encased in diamonds.
A modern vanitas piece about death
and money, but mostly about money.
“Putting the show together,” says Hirst,
“was like a big 180-degree turn for me. I’m
looking back at all this work and trying to
make sense of it. Some of it is great, and some
of it is unrealised and didn’t make it in there,
and some of it is just shit. It’s 25 bloody years
of work and, of course, I’m proud of it, proud
that I put the effort in, but there’s also one
part of me going, ‘How did that happen?’”
How, indeed? It is a question that exercises
the minds of his many detractors in the art
world: how did a mouthy, working-class lad
from Leeds, with hooligan tendencies,
become the biggest - and the richest - artist
on the planet? (In the Sunday Times Rich List
of 2010, Hirst’s wealth was estimated at
£215m.) The answer is long and complex, and
has much to do with the radical shifts in culture
that have occurred over the past 25 years
or so, both in Britain and the world: the
unstoppable rise of art as commodity and the
successful artist as a brand; the ascendancy of
a post-Thatcher generation of Young British
Artists (YBAs) who set out, unapologetically,
to make shock-art that also made money; the
attendant rise of uber-dealers such as Jay
Jopling in London and Larry Gagosian in New
York; and the birth of a new kind of gallery
culture, in which the blockbuster show rules
and merchandising is a lucrative sideline.
At the centre of this ultra-commodified art
world stands Damien Hirst, art superstar: the
richest, loudest, biggest YBA of all. Except
that, no longer young, he seems - at the very
moment when his canonisation by the art
establishment is complete - to be in a long
period of transition. When I last spoke to him,
in September 2009, in his vast studio near
Stroud, Gloucestershire, it was exactly a year
after the astounding success of Beautiful
Inside My Head Forever, his record-breaking
Sotheby’s auction of 2008. Back then, just
before the world markets tumbled, Hirst
made headlines by bypassing his dealers,
Jopling and Gagosian, altogether, and taking
more than £111m in sales in two days of
often-frenzied bidding. Right on the cusp of
the recession, the Sotheby’s auction was a
pivotal moment for Hirst - a grand farewell, he
told me, to the “big work” he had been making
for years. He also told me then that conceptualism
was “a total dead end” and said:
“You spend 20 years celebrating your immortality,
and then you realise that’s not what it’s
about.” Since then, he has been relatively quiet
on the creative (if not the commercial)
front, working mainly on his own paintings:
that is, canvases on which he, and he alone,
applies the paint. Many of them, including a
series made after the suicide of his friend
Angus Fairhurst in March 2008, were completed
in a room in Claridge’s that his good friend
Paddy McKillen (co-owner of the hotel)
loaned him rent-free, in return for some paintings
that now decorate the Connaught,
another of McKillen’s London hotels.
No Love Lost
An exhibition of that work, No Love Lost,
opened at the Wallace Collection in London in
October 2009 to uniformly murderous
reviews, the late art critic Tom Lubbock comparing
Hirst to “a not very promising first-year
art student”.
Undaunted, Hirst has continued to paint,
and when I travelled down to his country
home in deepest Devon a few weeks ago, he
showed me briefly around his garden shed,
where a paint-splattered stuffed bear stood
sentinel over a group of partially completed
canvases, featuring brightly coloured parrots
in lush landscapes and a single big painting of
a human head in a wash of what you might
call Bacon blue. A few stuffed parrots stood
on perches in the centre of the cluttered
room, bright yellow and green, as if staring at
their painted selves. “When all else fails,” Hirst
quipped, “get yourself a few dead parrots.” It
all seemed a long way from a giant blue shark
in a tank of formaldehyde. “I’ve spent a long
time avoiding painting and dealing with it
from a distance,” he said. “But as I get older
I’m more comfortable with it.”
The house in Devon, where Hirst currently
lives with his wife, Maia Norman, and their
three children, is one of several properties he
owns. He also has a stately home, Toddington
Manor, in Gloucestershire, that will one day
house a collection of his own work. Near
Stroud, he has another house with a vast studio
attached, where, not that long ago, many
of his 150-strong team of assistants laboured
over his serial works: the spot paintings, spin
paintings, cabinets and vitrines. He has a
houseboat in Chelsea, a house in Thailand,
where he spent Christmas, and another in
Mexico, although he hasn’t been there for a
while because “it’s a bit wild west out there at
the moment”.
In London, as well as Science, his organisational
hub, he also owns a big chunk of
Newport Street in Lambeth, which is currently
being turned into a new gallery that will open
in 2014 and house his extensive collection of
contemporary art by the likes of Bacon,
Koons, Murakami, Richard Prince, Sarah Lucas
and even Banksy - “We do these collaborations
with my spots. I got one from him
recently and he’d written all over it in big
black letters: Sorry, The Lifestyle You Ordered
Is Out of Stock.”
Over lunch in Hirst’s quayside restaurant in
Ilfracombe, beneath a pristine glass cabinet
full of pills, I ask him if it was always his motivation
to be the biggest, the most successful?
“I always wanted to be bigger, but not
biggest. Even as a kid in drawing class, I had
real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the
class but there was always some other feller
who was better; so I thought, ‘It can’t be
about being the best, it has to be about the
drawing itself, what you do with it.’ That’s
kind of stuck with me. Being best is a false
goal, you have to measure success on your
own terms.”
Art, ambition and money
With Damien Hirst, though, it aways seems
to come down to three things: art, ambition
and money, though not necessarily in that
order. For that reason, as curator Ann
Gallagher asserts in her catalogue introduction
to the Tate Modern show: “Like no other
artist of his generation, Damien Hirst has permeated
the cultural consciousness of our
times.” What that says about us - and about
Hirst - is a matter of some debate. Writing
recently in the New Yorker on the simultaneous
exhibition of all Hirst’s 1,500 signature
spot paintings in all 11 Gagosian galleries dotted
around the globe, the American art critic
Peter Schjeldahl wrote: “Hirst will go down in
history as a particularly cold-blooded pet of
millennial excess wealth. That’s not Old
Master status, but it’s immortality of a sort.”
Schjeldahl’s critical hauteur is not untypical.
The bigger Hirst has become, the more he
has become an object of scorn to some serious
art critics, a symptom of all that is wrong
with contemporary art - and the rampant,
market-led capitalism that drives it - as well as
an easy target for the flak directed at conceptual
art in general. “His work,” writes
Gallagher, measuredly, “is characterised by its
directness as well as its ambition; it is both
deadpan and affecting, and it provokes awe
and outrage in equal measure.”
That, one senses, is exactly how Hirst - mellower
these days, but still a northern prole
with attitude to burn - likes it. Is there a little
part of him that still rejoices in the notion that
he is, at heart, a working-class lad who is
somehow sticking it to the toffs of the art
world? “All of me, I’d say,” he replies, cackling.
“I mean, I don’t fit, do I? I can play the game,
but I don’t really fit. But you get older and you
realise that rebellion doesn’t really matter to
the market. I kind of learned that early on and
I’ve never forgotten it.” How early on? “Well, I
remember in about 1989, when I was still an
outsider and all my mates were having shows
and I wasn’t, and it really bugged me. As I was
making the fly piece, I was thinking: ‘I’m
gonna show you. I’m gonna kill you with this
one, knock you down dead, and change the
world.’ And I showed it to a few galleries and
they all just turned round and went
‘Marvellous, darling.’ It didn’t have the effect I
wanted. It had the opposite effect. I was gutted,
in a way.” As a young teenager, Damien Hirst
wanted most of all to be a punk, but, as he now
puts it, “I was just too young and not angry
enough.” He remembers his mother melting his
one Sex Pistols record to fashion it into a plant
holder, and he remembers sneaking out, aged
12 or 13, with his “punk clothes” hidden in a
bag, then changing into them when he was out
of sight of his house. “I think that attitude crept
into my art somehow. I was always looking for
ways to sneak stuff into the art world and make
it explode in their faces. I was an infiltrator.”
Growing up in Leeds, Hirst was a handful for his
mother, Mary Brennan, who worked in the local
Citizens’ Advice Bureau. His punk phase came
just after the man he thought was his father
walked out on the family when Hirst was 12. He
also went through a brief shoplifting phase - he
was arrested twice - before he was finally
accepted on his second application to study
an art foundation course at Jacob Kramer
College in Leeds.
As a teenager, he made regular visits to
Leeds University’s Anatomy Museum to practise
drawing, and it was there he found inspiration
for his first piece of shock art: a photograph
mounted on a steel frame called With
Dead Head, first exhibited in 1991, in which
his 16-year-old self poses, grinning, beside
the severed head of a middle-aged man
which sits on a mortuary table. It set the
scene, if not the tone, for much of what was
to follow.
Hirst moved to London in the mid-1980s,
and for a time worked on building sites,
before being accepted to Goldsmiths in 1986.
There, under the tutelage of the artist Michael
Craig-Martin, he realised that for the time
being, at least, painting was over and that, in
contemporary art, the idea was the be all and
end all.—Guardian