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Fabled and much feted art bad boy Damien Hirst opened his newest paintings to the dismay of the critics.
The
London Telegraph's critic, Mark Hudson, said in a headline "It couldn't get worse for Damien": Here, Hirst's daubs have been hung on walls newly lined in blue silk at a cost of £250,000, close to, if not actually alongside works by Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin. The result has been one of the most unanimously negative responses to any exhibition in living memory. Sarah Crompton, writing in this paper, was one of the kinder critics, finding the paintings merely "thin and one note". "Deadly dull, amateurish", wrote the
Guardian's critic. "Not worth looking at", said the
Independent. "Dreadful", pronounced
The Times.
"Not to like the dipsy wild-card Tracey Emin, self-styled bad boys Jake and Dinos Chapman and the spectacularly vacuous Sam Taylor-Wood was simply to be out of touch. Never mind that most of their supposed innovations had been made by other artists, most of whom had stayed poor, decades before. Ordering his art to be made by other people over the telephone, which earned Hirst such admiration and notoriety in the 1990s, had been done by the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1924. Indeed, the very name is telling: while the names of other modern art movements, from Cubism to Pop, tell you about their intentions, the term YBA says nothing more than that they were young and British."
"No, the groundbreaking aspects of the YBA phenomenon related almost exclusively to money and celebrity. When people look back to the initial "Freeze" exhibition, it's to the fact that the catalogue of a student show was sponsored by property developers Olympia & York. The actual content of the exhibition is rarely mentioned. The entire meaning of Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull is embodied in its price. The title, For the Love of God, is meaningless spin."
The
Time's critic was even nastier: "And here's where Damien's work goes off the historical track, or more rather exemplifies the immoral roller coaster we've been riding, only to fall off in the current bursted bubble. The work of Hirst and the YBAs celebrate nothing bigger than the bloated egos of the money people, exalted no higher ideals than money and celebrity."
To my mind, here's the big ah-ooof, Hirst actually painted all these paintings himself and the gimmick of hiring others to execute is gone. Vanished. The critics can't get over it. The alleged novelty of hiring others gone. Silly critics, silly Damien. Art and artists have always been collaborative. Artists and their patrons have always hired services, vendors and expertise. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the myth of the lone, starving artist wove its way into our narrative. Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Vermeer used assistants. Picasso's lithographs and etchings were pulled by master printmakers. I myself have hired fabricators to make panels for my big drawings and paintings. Damien Hirst was always right, and he's still right, in this regard, it is okay for an artist to present his ideas via whatever means he/she chooses. It doesn't matter whose hand makes the work. The thing that matters, that has always mattered, is the idea. Then decide if the shark in formadelhyde matters, if the diamond encrusted skull matters, if the paintings painted by the actual hand of Damien Hirst matter.
