There are artists who everyone loves to hate. They seem to
get an undeserved bang for their buck, garnering maximum attention for little
effort which is usually performed by fleets of assistants who execute the works
in question. Julian Schnabel was the nominee for most hated of the commercially
successful fine artists back in the 80’s but he became a filmmaker whose
successes though not as great are also reviled by those who feel that both his
commercial and artistic renown is unmerited. In today’s art world Damien Hirst
is the most vilified amongst the cognoscenti who sneer at the huge sums
commanded, for instance, by his recent spot paintings. Who are the conspicuous
consumers who pay top dollar for his work at Larry Gagosian’s international
network of galleries which do for the marketing of paintings what Brown
Harris Stevens was able to do when they commanded 88 million dollars for the
sale of Sandy Weill’s penthouse at 15 Central Park West to Ekaternina Rybolovlev
the daughter of the Russian potash billionaire? Surely Brown Harris is one provider of the
excessively priced apartments on which high priced art can be shown. But
wait a minute? Are we being too hasty? In a review of Hirst’s current show at
the Tate, in the April 20th edition of the TLS, running under the title “The Disgusting Sublime,” Gerard
Woodward brilliantly takes up Hirst’s defense. ("The Physical Impossibility of
the Idea of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” was the title of Hirst’s famed
l991 shark sculpture. And come to think of it, isn’t that title alone worth
millions?) “In an essay in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, Brian
Dillon directs us towards Kant’s Critique
of Judgement to help us deal with a particular property of the work of
Damien Hirst, namely disgust,” Woodward begins. And later talking about
Hirst’s sometimes horrifying palette (“corpses of thousands of flies preserved
in resin,” for example) he remarks, “the ideational notion of disgust is useful
as a way of thinking about the critical recepton of Hirst’s work in recent
years, for it is often obscured or even contaminated by associations with a
cynical art plutocracy and its excessive interest in wealth, and a perception
of Hirst himself as someone tainted with such unsavoury qualities as arrogance,
laddishness, exploitativeness and cruelty.” Another million dollar idea, which
will undoubtedly fatten both Hirst and Larry Gogosian’s pockets, but which also
makes us think. Whoever said art or life were fair?
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