Regardless of what we think of him, whether we like him or not there no denying I’m bloody jealous of what he’s accomplished and the impact he’s had on the art world. He won’t go down as a Monet or a Picasso but he certainly made all of us change the way we think about art
@@christopherwestpresents I’m guilty of pretty much owning almost every piece of literature on Damien Hirst and all the YBA’s. Amassed s huge collection of coffee table books, catalogs and books from shows/exhibitions. In 2014 when you visited Damien’s exhibition at white cube “two weeks, one summer” you even got a free print of a painting that featured which should hopefully be worth something in the future!
I've never been impressed by what I've seen of Hirst's, except perhaps as audacious conceptual gesture, but this kind of mercenary dishonesty (the first I've heard of this by Hirst) is dismaying. Perhaps it will consign Hirst's work to the dustbin of passing art-world fancies, which is likely where it belonged in the first place.
I love this, I was a huge fan of his when I first became interested in art. He made some of this most interesting work I'd ever seen. But as the years have gone by, and his process and ideas become less personal and more mechanical, I became bored of him. His veil paintings were the last straw for me, really made me believe the saying "if you can't paint good, paint big".
This is exactly what Robert Longo said at my friend Duke's house in about 1983. He said he started making his work large so it would have to go to museums. I also think he may have back dated his Men in the Cities drawings to 1977.
I have read (in a few places) that the originals (of the sharks specifically) have started to simply deteriorate. I also read that he has "backdated" them based on the year(s) they were concepted. If the originals are indeed deteriorating and he has had to re-imagine or rebuild them, and he was being a thoughtful artist and trying to conserve and/or preserve his work, then a dual date would be acceptable would it not? I feel that had he done something like that it would show his level of care for his work and its legacy. However, his current approach to this is just making him seem like a bit of a charlatan IMHO. Though, unlike your opinion of his latest work that he has been painting himself, I actually like what I have seen of his cherry blossom series (though, granted I have not seen them in real life, just online). Keep making these videos. I am truly enjoying them.
Thanks so much for the kind words. And I totally agree - the dual date is the perfectly acceptable answer. No one expects a shark to remain perfectly preserved forever. But to create a new work - then back date it to conception? That’s a real stretch for me.
I'm glad this was finally addressed by someone on your level in such a plain-spoken presentation. I remember when I had read about the deterioration of the 'Shark-in-a-Box' & was shocked. I always thought (maybe naively) that large pieces of artwork had all those 'logistics' researched & 'tested' out before the museum installations...& certainly these humongous, complex pieces had well-thought-out meticulous artist instructions for travel/re-assemblage/display... As a young junior high student on a field-trip with my French class, I first viewed Étant donnés & The Large Glass...I was astonished by the visuals & vastness & materials...I never knew 'artists' could create such things to 'hang' in museums. Ever since, I've loved & researched my favourite artists... their process of creating (even of you don't care for an artwork, the act of Creative Engineering is to be respected. Specifically: Duchamp, Matisse (Vence Chapel), Calder (mobile hanging sculptures, Cirque Calder), Dalí (Christ of St. John of The Cross, sculptures)...even the world-renowned art collector Albert Barnes had strict, unwavering parameters about the permance & display of his art collection (that gave the Barnes Foundation board years of controversy & headaches before the relocation & expansion). I guess I never felt I knew enough about art history or artists to even discuss my thoughts about Hirst's rotting fish...so thank you for just saying it out loud! Hirst has no excuse & the backdating is just gluttonous greed. In my early 20s I was 'wowed' by that pharmacy wall-cabinet display too, but as I've aged, I can admit when my tastes fell prey to an artists grift (or I realized that I can be just as "impressed" by opening my own vanity medicine cabinet & have a look inside)! Whoever said it best, Hirst is a slick 'shark-oil salesman' 🦈.
The slickest! And I actually wouldn’t have a problem if the shark had to be replaced and he told us about it. Pushing art forward is about experimenting. But don’t make something new and try to tell me it’s old!
I broke up with him when I saw his show at Gagosian Gallery, NY, before covid. Huge, plain, flat white canvases with 1/2" dots of different colors stamped on them. None with the textures of his paintings in your video. They were like larger versions of a color theory assignment I did as a freshman art student. My work proved controversial in critique, so I suppose I should consider myself in good company, but mostly I just thought he was raking in the dough with little substance to the work. At least I was trying to solve a problem.
@@christopherwestpresents Yes. I'm very disappointed in him. I am also disappointed in his gallery and their personnel who were quite excited about the work. I believe that one's gallery has the responsibility to advise an artist when their work isn't defensible and they are clearly working against their own interests.
Good video. What I've seen time and time again is someone from a limited background, they're rich, or they only went to art school and never dug a ditch or pounded nails. Here's this thing I made! They are wowed by it. _Dead animals are really interesting and a bit thought provoking._ One says I made it, the other one pays a lot for it... and then someone like me who's actually been in the ocean in a kayak with great white sharks feet away, or blue whales coming to visit me... thinks, yeah okay, what's the big deal? ( I think Warhol's true contribution may not be his art so much as it was to point out that supermarkets are art museums. Might be bad kitschy art, but it is the art of our age. Have artists ever got around to addressing this huge question?) I remember very clearly being maybe 8 or 9 years old in the Detroit Institute of Arts looking at a Claes Oldenberg plug tree hanging on a wire. I thought, cool, he gets it. I'd always thought plug trees were amazing. So what's the difference? Oldenberg wasn't overly impressed with himself. Hirst obviouslyh is. Stand in a gallery with a dealer who keeps repeating, "Spectacular, remarkable..." until you figure out they are trying to convince themselves. So they can to that to somebody else and sell it to them. I also always like Calder so I figured out how to make them. The materials available to me are so much better than Calder had that mine move more freely, and I left the 'feathers' bare aluminum so they reflect the light from other side of the room, outside windows and doors. Robert Irwin and Jim Turrell would like them. I still love Calder. But I am annoyed that Calder made 'older' versions and back dated them, essentially forging himself, and diluting his progress. Maybe Calder had some bills to pay. Multi multi millionaire Hirst back dating his work has no excuse. That isn't just about greed, that's also about a paucity of spirit and intellectual dishonesty. Jones is spot on. And it's not that by doing this Hirst degrades his earlier output. I think those works were grossly overrated at the time. What are you looking at when you look at one of his animals in formaldehyde? You're looking at the dead animal in formaldehyde. There's been a whale shark in formaldehyde at the Los Angeles Science Museum for at least 50 years. Same aesthetic and interest effect.
Let me begin by telling you that when my brother was just starting school, he rebelled at the rules of spelling. Why did words have to be spelled in a particular way? Why couldn't he spell them as he wanted to spell them? He resented the rules and he resisted the authority of those who made them ! Keep this in mind. I think that Conceptual art originated with people who could not and would not do the difficult work required to become a 'traditional' artist. Can't master the necessary skills ? No knowledge of perspective? Can't draw? Don't want to have to learn color theory? Can't master composition? No knowledge of human anatomy? Can't render tonal values Can’t be bothered ? These are skills that you have to WORK to perfect. It’s difficult. It takes…..effort. You want a fast track to the exalted position of "artist “. Well then, belittle the importance of those skills and debase the notion that they are a prerequisite to creating art. Instead, create an art genre that you CAN do. A new genre. And let's call it Conceptual art. Conceptual artists claim that IDEAS and CONCEPTS are the main feature of their art. They can slap anything together and call it ''conceptual art'' confident that viewers will find SOMETHING to think about it no matter how banal or trivial the artist's concept! There is no way conceptual art pieces can be judged. The promoters of this art have attacked the motives and credibility of authorities and critics who might disparage the work. They have rejected museums and galleries as defining authorities. They reject the idea that art can be judged or criticized . All of this results in a decline in standards. And when you jettison standards, quality suffers. There really IS such a thing as BAD art ! We know this only because we have standards and criteria by which such things can be evaluated. It seems that conceptual art comes down to a basic idea: No one has the right or authority to make any judgements about art ! Art is anything you can get away with ! A whole new language has been created to give the work an air of legitimacy and gravitas. Conceptual art is 'sold' to the unwary public with ....."ArtSpeak". ArtSpeak is a unique assemblage of English words and phrases that the International Art world uses but which are devoid of meaning! Have you ever found yourself confronted by an art gallery’s description of an exhibition which seems completely indecipherable? Or an artist’s statement about their work which left you more confused than enlightened? You’re not alone. Here are examples of ArtSpeak: 'Works that probe the dialectic between innovations that seem to have been forgotten, the ruinous present state of projects once created amid great euphoria, and the present as an era of transitions and new beginnings.'' Or ''The exhibition reactivates his career-long investigation into the social mutations of desire and repression. But his earlier concerns with repression production--in the adolescent or in the family as a whole--give way to the vertiginous retrieval and wayward reinvention of mythical community and sub-cultural traditions.'' This language is meant to convince me that there is real substance to this drivel which is being passed off as art. I don't buy it. But plenty of other people DO buy it. Not because they love the work. They are laying out enormous sums in the belief that their investment will bring them high returns in the future. One Jeff Koons conceptual piece is three basketballs suspended in a fish tank. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_Ball_Total_Equilibrium_Tank_by_Jeff_Koons,_Tate_Liverpool.jpg Here is Koons' own ArtSpeak explanation of his floating basketball 'concept' verbatim: “ This is an ultimate state of being. I wanted to play with people’s desires. They desire this equilibrium. They desire pre-birth. I was giving a definition of life and death. This is the eternal. This is what life is like, also, after death. Aspects of the eternal” Rather lofty goals for 3 basketballs suspended in a fish tank!! It sold for $350,000. I wonder what it would have fetched without Koons' name attached to it. Or take the case of Martin Creed's ball of crumpled white copy paper. www.abebooks.com/signed/Work-sheet-paper-crumpled-ball-Creed/7404135374/bd He made almost 700 of them! Some sold for hundreds of dollars. Martin Creed, when asked during an interview how he would respond to those who say the crumpled paper ball isn’t art said : “ I wouldn’t call this art either. Who says, anyway, what’s good and what’s bad?” Interviewer: ''When confronted with conceptual art, we shouldn’t worry whether it’s art or not because no one really knows what art is.'' Is this what art has come to?? _________________________________ Something radical has happened to the art scene in the past 60 years. Cubism slid into non-representational art....what is often called Abstract. Abstract or non-representational art is a legitimate and often profound genre. But to many people, it appeared as if this new style had no structure, principles or standards of evaluation. It’s markings seemed random and arbitrary. Something that anyone could do. Any composition of blotches or scribbles was “Abstract Art”. This was the slippery slope that led to the abandonment of standards in art. Art is what I say it is....and lots of people jumped on the art bandwagon. Anyone can be an artist. Anyone can mount a show. And who is to say if it has value or not ? A tacit agreement has formed among critics, galleries, publications and auction houses to promote and celebrate certain artists and styles. Objects with no artistic merit are touted and praised . Their value increases with every magazine article, every exhibition in a prestigious gallery. And when they come up for auction, sometimes the auction houses will lend vast sums to a bidder so that it appears as if the work of the particular artist is increasing in value. The upward spiral begins and fortunes are made. And many are reluctant to declare that the Emperor is, in fact, naked lest they appear boorish unsophisticated Philistines ! This is what dominates the art market today. The love of money is the root of all evil. It has corrupted politics. It has corrupted sport. It has corrupted healthcare. It has corrupted religion. It has corrupted the media. And now it has corrupted art. But, there is reason to hope. As much of the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans was kept alive through the Middle Ages in small pockets of learning and culture, ateliers have sprung up around the world that are devoted to preserving and handing down the traditional visual arts: drawing, painting and sculpting to each new generation. And when this craze for conceptual art has burned itself out and when visual art is no longer looked on as mere decoration and when schools that have dissolved their art programs want to reestablish them again, the world will find these skills preserved through the atelier movement
I really wonder though... What do you think of the fact that all these works of his are concepts and forms stolen from other artists? I sort of miss the point of disliking the fact that he lied about production dates, when the entirety of his carreer is a collection of these "stunts"
Hirst's shark was never art. It was an advertisement... for Damian Hirst. Hyped by Saatchi, an advertising exec, which should have been the giveaway. Hirst is a spiv and a chancer, and always has been.
@@christopherwestpresents Iam glad you can see the truth.. My belief in modern art stops at Rothko.. and they can't even display his work correctly, the way he instructed! would love to know more about your journey... sometime..
I do like Damien's take on whether or not the shark piece represents death or it's "just a shark"... Damien admittingly always tells people it represents the opposite of what they tell him they think it is. ha!
