Artist of the Month: Damien Hirst

[~JON]

This month is a little different because we are inviting all our members to add a fact, comment or link to a favorite piece of his art to form a presentation on Damien Hirst.
Let's see what kind of a profile we can collaboratively put together!

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. While still a

student at Goldsmith's College in 1988, he curated the now renowned

student exhibition, Freeze, held in east London. In this exhibition, Hirst

brought together a group of young artists who would come to define

cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. In 1991, he had his first solo

exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in

which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of

which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls.

In 1992, he was part of the ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition

at the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical

Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a

glass tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the

prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in

1995.

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/damien-hirst/

Watch him on The Charlie Rose Show

What do you have to offer?



Previous Artist of the Month topics:
January
February
March
April

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[anthony mauve]

The Red Auction raised $42.6 million for AIDS research! Hirst and Bono--great artists, great humanitarians--list of works in the auction here:

http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot...umbe r=N08421

anthony

[AddiesArt]

A sculpture; Virgin Mother

http://www.wirednewyork.com/images/a...gin_mother.jpg

[Tom Perry]

Like pollock, a real low life. At least with Pollock I can admire his work and I am quite sure he was never sued for copying someone else's work, as has Hirst, several times. The sculpture AddiesArt posted is one of those he stole.

I guess you can tell from my remarks that I have little use for shock art.

[BlueRiderMan]

I'm not all that interested in him, but--->

And when Hirst is not good? He's still a cash cow. Over the past two decades, with work of very fluctuating quality, Hirst has assembled a net worth that the Sunday Times of London estimated earlier this year at $364 million. The money has bought him a farm in Devon where he lives with his companion Maia Norman and their three sons; a Gothic Revival mansion that he plans to convert into a private museum; and a house in Mexico where the family relocates for three months a year so Maia, who's Californian, can surf. When he's in London for a few days each week he takes a suite at Claridge's, the last word in posh hotels. For a boy raised in what was then the threadbare industrial city of Leeds, it's nice. Or as Hirst puts it: "I like having the doormen say: 'Welcome home, sir.'"

The money also pays for his small army of studio assistants. Hirst employs 120 people at six locations in England, including two massive facilities in Gloucestershire housed in converted World War II airplane hangars. Not all of his people work on the manufacturing end, but scores of assistants execute his product-lines-on-canvas, which are hugely profitable but for the most part aesthetically negligible. Those include hundreds of "spot paintings," each a multicolored grid of little circles and named after a pharmaceutical product; "spin paintings" made by pouring paint onto a whirling disk; and "butterfly paintings" made by embedding dead butterflies in pigment and resin, sometimes in elaborate stained-glass-window formations, sometimes just attached here and there on the canvas. At Sotheby's the spin paintings are expected to fetch as much as $720,000 each, the spots as much as $1.2 million.

Hirst's gift, when it's with him, is for black comedy, William Hogarth meets Stanley Kubrick — work that's part deadpan joke, part dead serious utterance about mortality and decay. The piece that first made him famous, an open-jawed shark in a tank of formaldehyde titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, offered a giant beast of prey as a belligerent correlative for a universally suppressed anxiety. A Thousand Years is a large glass box in which real maggots hatch into flies that appear to feed on blood (actually red sugar water) from a severed cow's head, then are killed by an electric bug zapper — the tragic cycle of life and death played as low farce by the lowest orders. And there's something both hilarious and chilling about his Lullaby series, steel and mirror-glass medicine cabinets in which colorful pills are meticulously organized into glittering reliquaries.

But Hirst's career always threatens to amount to a core of genuine invention surrounded by a vast penumbra of middling merchandise.......

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...838681,00.html


~

[nohalo]

Incredible marketing and incredibly overrated. Just my opinion though.

[Eraethil]

Here are a few quotes attributed to Damien Hirst that I do like:

"I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work."

"Artists are like everybody else."

"My Mum brought me up to believe that if you look after the pennies then the pounds look after themselves, and I could never do it."

[Postmoderschisms]

he had a good show which was part francis bacon retrospective few years back, kinda makes sense.

He is an artist that has kept interest in the arts...more than what any of us has done. well done Mr Hirst

[Prizmetrix]

I feel he "manufactures" art rather than creates it. I really don't feel that a dead animal in formaldehyde is art. He's an expert marketer who knows what sells. Nothing wrong in being successful but I think it says a lot about the state of art today. Just my two cents.

[Postmoderschisms]

but isnt that your [prizmetrix] problem, not arts or the problem with Hirst...

i mean, you might not feel the shock of his work all the way in Iowa, but he really animated art in london and now theres this, that and everything. art excelled itself after the YBA, surely thats a good state for art to be in? It opens the possibility for even your art to be voiced. Hirst is doing what art has always done, we just know about it a lot more and feel pissed off he's doing it and not us...even if its the style you dont like [edit] dislike comes from a fear of the different, that it could cause disaster for your perceived opinions on things, that maybe yours are wrong and not the art system thats to blame. get with the programme!

question: have you seen a Hirst work in the flesh so to speak?

[edit]

[Prizmetrix]

Whoa! Sorry if I offended you! Just so you know, I'm not some bumpkin living in a corn field. I actually grew up right outside of New York City so I have seen art (although not Hirst in the flesh). I just think that having 120 studio assistants is a bit over the top but, hey, more power to him!

[Prizmetrix]

Have a good day, kinda

[Eraethil]

I think it is unfortunate that so much of modern art seems to pride itself on being inexplicable. Personally, I think that pieces like Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (the shark in a tank), while being thought provoking for those of us that are open minded, have also had a negative impact on art.

The average viewer sees them as so much hoooey, and acceptance by the established art community just confirms for them that abstract and modern art is mostly hoooey. While artists like Hirst have padded their pockets nicely, that padding has made it harder for abstract artists to make a living I think.

Oh, and inexplicable posts make it hard to take you seriously PMS, in the same way. But I understand. kinda

[serenely asymmetric]

^ It’s a good title though.

[Tom Perry]

Trust me on this; I very much dislike stepping in dog crap, but don't really find anything new or different about it, nor do I have any deep rooted phobia about it, I just dislike it.

Originally Posted by Postmoderschisms

.... dislike comes from a fear of the different, that it could cause disaster for your perceived opinions on things, that maybe yours are wrong and not the art system thats to blame. get with the programme!