McDonald then goes on to compare Hirst's activities with that of an artist who is described as primarily interested in the art process and not the financial outcomes. The message I get is that and artist who is not financially successful or at least is disinterested in this is somehow a more authentic artist. Maybe there is room for a new category - Art and the market, The manipulation of the Art economy.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Damien Hirst and the accumulation of capital
John McDonald's column "Visual Art" in SMH September 27-28 pages 18 &19 jokes that Damien Hurst could be Andy Warhol's love child. He exposes Hirst's commercial activities as blatant tactics for maintaining the value of his work. (shades of Greenberg's support of his art theory by supporting those artists that fitted his "principles of purity"). My sense of Hirst's work is that he at once exploits and ridicules the "art economy" which I suppose is not very different in intent from Duchamp's urinal. I was interested to find that Hirst has "almost 200 people in a chain of specialised art-making workshops" to produce his work. Cynically McDonald suggests that Hirst buys his own work to maintain or inflate its value. Interestingly McDonald claims that this is accurate social comment "Hirst has made the accumulation of capital his central artistic concern. In this, he has perfectly captured the temper of our times." However he also suggests that Hirst's activities are "almost indistinguishable from high end commodity trading" so where is the line between art and commerce, artist and manufacturer? Is there a performance aspect of Hirst's work... the marketing performance. Certainly it is no secret that Hirst buys his own work, however , as pointed out by McDonald, we don't know to what extent he manipulates the market for his own work. If his art was part marketing performance I would have expected him to be obvious about his activities.
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3 comments:
Certainly the stereotype of the dirt poor angsty tortured artist (aka Van Gough) still exists in Contemporary society. But practically does that sort of artist really exist? Surely as artists it is our aim to exist primarily from creating art, which necessitates our selling and marketing our art. People generally see this as going against the grain of what art truly stands for, but doesn't art stand for society, and really doesn't society revolve around commerce and success? I may think Damien Hirst is a wanker, but I think his art is really interesting, and I'm more than a little jealous of his ability to be so loved in the gallery scene...
Producing certain works, to certain specifications, in order to sell them to a specific buyer (or to yourself) isn't morally objectional,if the funds you receive from these works allow you to create works that have less of a financial success but are perhaps personally fulfilling. If they are a means to an ends. Ego inflation is a boring, Hirst will be famous, but never admired as a person.
That's because he's a wanker. That's not very subjective is it?
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