Damien Hirst

[emmie]

does anyone have any thoughts on this artist and his work. I was watching
a piece on the news recently as he has a new exhibition on and wondered quite what to make of him.

[flump1]

Yes Em, total cr@p !!

[Maydup]

I don't much like his work nor that of Tracey Emin, but I do admire them both for thier orginality.

People often comment that they or their 4 yr old children could do better, but the difference is - they don't. The messy bed has been done, we're not wanting to see anyone elses messy bed or their pile of bricks. Have an original idea, find a gallery and carry it out, then lets see if its "art". I bet it will be.

[emmie]

so seem to agree some don't, probably just like the art world, i wonder what that snob Brian Sewell makes of it all.

[emmie]

this is also something i don't understand, and i am surprised that a crack in a floor would be considered art.

http://en.wikipedia.o...bboleth_%28artwork%29

[venator]

These artists' talents are in talking their rubbish up into a concept that someone wants to buy. Politicians do much the same.

I have to admire them - nobody would buy a pile of bricks or a party line from me!

[emmie]

to think that artists like Van Gogh were largely ignored and indeed died in penury makes you wonder what constitutes art for some. Though i object at the vast sums paid for paintings, which often end up in a vault never to be seen again.

[Mosaic]

...Van Gogh had a brilliant publicity machine in the form of his brother and sister - after his death they banged the drum loud and long.
Personally I don't think he could draw or paint overly well.
But boy is it recognisable!

[munchie63]

I guess it's whatever you make of it, and maybe that's the point. if you look at it and like it, fine. If you don't, then just move along.
I like a lot of 'urban Art' but Hirst puzzles me. I think he's very clever, and will probably go to the Tate and have a look. But, take the maggots/flies piece he has on show - is it a statement about the cycle of life & death etc ? I look at it, shake my head and move on. Maybe I don't get it. Other bits I like. I think Hirst's like 'the kings new suit'....people will pay money for it so.....
I know I'd rather look at the Canaletto paintings in the National gallery as I find them fantastic. What I'd call 'real art'. That said, I like Banksy, Baldwin, Denning so each to there own.

[emmie]

i like some of the modern artists, i just don't like him. went to national portrait gallery recently, and could only marvel at the works on offer, the newer more modern paintings were very good, and the iconic photographs of people like David Bailey well worth a visit.

[ladybirder]

Em, here's what Brian Sewell thinks of DH's stuff.

[i] The butterfly room, however, is unbearable. I saw its first incarnation in the Woodstock Gallery in 1991 and was sickened by it then, for it knowingly involves the death of butterflies, probably tens of thousands of them by the time this wretched exhibition ends on September 9. Even before the exhibition opened these creatures were fluttering exhausted on the gallery floor, denied anything that resembles their natural habitat. How is it that they are “only” butterflies? How is that the RSPCA does not protest? How can any decent man or woman walk through this room — the In and out of Love — without the rise of anger at such cruelty? What an artist does at 26 one may perhaps attribute to the waywardness of his intelligence, but at 47 how could Hirst bear to repeat such vain cold-blooded inhumanity?

All who care for living things should boycott this exhibition. Disgust must be the response of the sane, not only to the use, abuse and deaths of butterflies, but to the exploitation of farm animals mercilessly slaughtered in the knacker’s yard and, at an aesthetic level, to Hirst’s taste for the ghastly glitz and glamour found in Miami’s holiday hotels. I can sum it up as shiny Sugar. Bob Geldof, on the other hand, might repeat his estimation of Hirst’s Sotheby’s sale when, awestruck as he was by its garish glister he bellowed “f***ing marvellous” for all to hear.

Hirst himself will, no doubt, describe this show of his work too as “epic”. It is nothing of the kind; a meagre third of the number of exhibits in the Sotheby’s sale, it is a little more didactic. A handful of things tell us how Hirst began, another handful the state of his imaginings in 2006-9 — bigger, much bigger and much shinier, but essentially the same — and between them lie the sterile old familiars that, once seen, have nothing more to give. Put bluntly, this man’s imagination is quite as dead as all the dead creatures here suspended in formaldehyde. [i]