DAMIEN HIRST
Tate Modern
4 April–9 September 2012
It is always difficult to be at odds with the prevailing view, but to my mind the kind of work produced by Damien Hirst, so often about the ‘concept’ rather than the making, has had the most pernicious consequences for art in this country. It is all very well for his defenders to say that Rafael and Rubens used assistants to bring their ideas to completion, but the reason they used assistants was to save time: they could have done the work themselves, they had the craft and the training. By contrast, the stuff that Hirst claims for his own hand is barely competent. Meanwhile, at our art schools, all too often students who wish to develop their skills in drawing or painting are required instead to work with what are grandly called objets trouves because what matters is not the execution but the idea. It is just so much easier to make ‘art’ with pre-existing objects rather than construct things oneself. Of course, you have to blame Duchamp for the start of this, but no-one has matched Hirst for the shameless (and successful) vulgarity with which he has presented stuff to the public — not least the unspeakable diamond-encrusted skull given its own special room in this exhibition — and the influence that has followed.
Damien Hirst, Pharmacy, 1992. Glass, faced particleboard, painted MDF, beech, ramin, wooden dowels, aluminium, pharmaceutical packaging, desks, office chairs, foot stools, apothecary bottles, coloured water, insect-o-cutor, medical text books, stationary, bowls, resin, honey, and honey.
Dimensions variable, Tate. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates.
© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012.
Do the serious people in charge of Tate Modern genuinely consider that his work deserves a major show set alongside Picasso and the British modernists of the 20th century, let alone that it should take this prime space for the duration of the Olympic games in what is trumpeted as ‘the first major Damien Hirst exhibition in the UK’? It really doesn’t matter how elegantly you present this work, how well it sits in the space: to borrow a phrase from the last US presidential election, ‘it’s still lipstick on a pig’. Nor does it matter how long you make the title of a piece — quasi-metaphysical expressions do not turn a piece of taxidermy into something that illuminates the human condition. And the killing of living creatures as exquisite as butterflies to make an exhibit is really pretty vile. I suspect, in fact, that Hirst is well aware of this, and that the titles are self-parodying.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2012
