June 14, 2007
Art and Death
I've been reading about Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull sculpture with some interest. The Manolo himself sent me a link to the White Cube gallery page - very nicely illustrated! Click on the images on the right to see the preserved shark, among others.
Hirst is a problem. I know people who start to foam at the mouth at the idea that splitting a cow in half and suspending it in formaldehyde is art. I have my moments of wonderment, too - is this art or salesmanship for salesmanship's sake?
I think that Hirst in most of his public statements misses the boat - but then art historians are used to taking artists' statements as no more than a starting point. He keeps saying things like 'I've always adhered to the principle that the simplest ideas are the best, and this will be the ultimate two fingers up to death. I want people to see it and be astounded. I want them to gasp.' (I picked this up here, and I'm not entirely certain where the blogger found it, but it rings true).
What Hirst isn't looking at is the bigger idea of one of the big things art has always been about - survival.
I'm a medievalist. My bread'n'butter course is Art 101: Cave Painting through Gothic. One of my annual jobs is trying to teach beginners that not all art is about self-expression - in fact, art before later modernity is seldom about the artist's feelings. There are lots of things older art cares about - glorifying a deity, glorifying a ruler, decorating a surface, explaining the world. The aspect Damien Hirst should care about, because he's a part of it, is something that is or can be about the artist even when the art is intensely impersonal - and that's survival through the act of making something outside the self.
Though there's not a lot of overt self-expression in ancient or medieval art, the artists have indeed survived so long as we study their works. Damien Hirst, in his habit of depicting death, is cheating death - if only for a little while. Somehow I figure that The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living will have more conservation issues than the statue of Khafre, even though they are remarkably similar works in some ways.
So, do I think the skull is worth fifty million pounds?
Eh - I don't have the collecting gene. But it is interesting. I may lead with it in the fall.
I thank the Manolo for stimulating this little line of thought.
further: Oh - it's not that Hirst is wrong about what it is he's doing, it's that he's inside it. He certainly is giving Death two fingers up. But he's also dealing with Tradition, whether he's interested in that or not. While walking the dog a bit ago I realized that an even better comparison than Egyptian death-cheating-by-art might be to show you one of the plastered skulls from Jericho. Put that next to Damien Hirst's For the Love of God.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at June 14, 2007 1:17 PM