For the love of God by Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst recently became the richest living artist on the planet. His piece For the Love of God, 2007 which is a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with diamonds recently sold for 50 million pounds to an investment consortium. This week he will be auctioning hundreds of new works at Sotheby’s, and… bypassing the galleries, Damien hopes his ‘greatest hits’ as he calls it, to raise somewhere in the vicinity of 65 million pounds. He remains adamant however that money takes second place to the art itself.
Much in the same way the famous Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whilst using political themes as the catalyst for his paintings (see ‘Execution’) also uses the compositions and themes from past classical artists such as Vermeer and Manet, Damien, uses his theme of death whilst, (as he confesses) recreating the modern works of Francis Bacon in his Sculptures. Is it then that contemporary art is lacking in new ideas or that the postmodern artist, by definition, is purely challenging what came before in a new form?
Firstly, if the artist was lacking in new ideas why pursue time and effort into creating superficial phony pieces of so called art? And if the latter, why are the artists’ own commentaries on their works of art so vague and uninformative. Perhaps as Jackson Pollock once said, ‘When looking at a bed of roses, do you try and wonder what it means, or do you simply enjoy the fact that it is there?’ Isn’t it just this point that enables the artist to create pretty much anything in the name of art? One might argue that what makes artists successful today is access to a good marketing team and publicists that can enable new works to be hyped into the public consciousness, thus creating a celebrity status of the artist in which everything they touch/create turns to gold with little explanation of the concepts behind the works needed. No wonder people remain skeptical. As art critic Richard Hughes suggests, ‘The works, are now like film stars, while the galleries have been reduced to the level of the limousines used to convey them to people’ Therefore, once art becomes a public spectacle the true meaning is lost.
Whatever your stance on today’s contemporary art, one must acknowledge that new art is created first then marketed, it particularly helps to have someone like Charles Saatchi on your side. The more controversial nature of today’s contemporary art only serves to fund more public interest into such pieces as for example Damien’s ‘For the Love of God, 2007’ and with such celebrity status in art comes perceived value in meaning, or cash or both…
(Thank you to contributor Dan Groves for the article. It’s also worth noting that on the September 16th auction Hirst’s collection of work sold for over 70 million pounds)
