Art Critic Robert Hughes Slams Damien Hirst
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- Опубликовано: 24 янв 2024
- Art critic, Robert Hughes slams artist Damien Hirst in excerpts from a hard to find documentary not on RUclips. Video includes choice arguments in a newspaper article rebutting Hughes, as well as my own commentary throughout.
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Subscribed 👍 Finally a decent art channel, tired of the typical video essay cottage factory by midwit redditors reiterating and recanonising shite “art” belched up by art dealers to be chewed on by hedge fund managers
Thanks for noticing the difference. Think I'll have to pin this comment. Oh, not coincidentally, I'm banned from the art history, art theory, and contemporary art subreddits. The gatekeepers don't like me one bit.
I understand Hirst made more than one shark. The buyer of said shark was upset that his expensive "vanity" piece was rotting away. It had to be replaced. No pity for these wealthy art collecting "posers". Hughes opinions are spot on. To bad the video Mona Lisa Curse is no longer available....Posers protecting their substandard investments, and their poor taste.
I'm an artist and come from the working class. I tell it as I see it. Not beholden to money or politics.
I could watch and listen to Mr. Hughes all day; such scathing intelligence, such sophisticated and subtle humour. Wonderful.
I am in total agreement.
I miss Robert Hughes.
Marcel Duchamp fortold what Art was going to evolve into with his ready made pieces. Damien Hirst is one amongst many artists that are over estimated
Duchamp didn't merely foretell it, he actively instigated this whole nonsense by his own pioneering gesture of creating art by merely naming something as such. It's ironic that one of my favorite twentieth-century artworks is Duchamp's 1912 painting "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2", given how little else in his legacy inspires me.
@@barrymoore4470That piece is one of my favorites too. He really did have talent.
I don't think he really could know exactly how his prank would go over and how it would change the trajectory of the modern art market.
This is what we typically see. Duchamp was pissed that he didn't get more recognition for "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2," and was rejected by a Surrealist exhibition. Truth his he couldn't compete with Picasso and he knew it. His "Fountain" was done out of spite in order to "discredit art" which he wanted destroyed in the same way, according to him, religion has lost all credibility. Few understand what Duchamp's stated purpose was. My next video will clear that up.
His prank didn't go over very well. He was retroactively resurrected mid last century in order to prop up American art that used found objects or appropriated from popular culture. In his own time and his own country his prank was a mildly amusing curiosity on the margins and in the footnotes of art history.
Over estimated for sure.
My friends Mum went to Goldsmiths with him and said that Hirst is not from working class background like he claims. His Mum bought him a 5 bedroom house in South London for him and all his mates to live in during his undergraduate.
Whoa! Houses prices in South London were going way up when I left in 1979. Hirst didn’t start art school when I was going to art school there. He went to art school in what- the nineties? His Mum must have had serious bucks.
i went to goldsmiths. lots of virtue signalling poshies. the whole working class thing is pure romance for those types. very withnail and i
Meanwhile I really am a working class artist.
It’s funny that almost nothing is said about his father? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an interview where he mentions him, always his mum or grandmother
My god, who the heck cares?
Conceptual art isn't a bad thing really. It gives people who can't draw a sense of belonging.
Yes it's sad but a lot of them seem to lack even basic skills. If you study performing arts they'll teach you how to act/sing/dance "properly" and you can do what you like with that afterwards. But when you learn painting it looks like you just do what you like, justify it with lots of waffle, and they don't really teach painting at all!
It's not art it's about money. Many artists have been backed by money to make money. It's easy to launder too.
Yyyyyyyuuuuuuuup!
@@artvsmachine3703 It's a bit sad but it's not about money for many artists. I would love to see Van Gogh's face when his flowers went under the hammer.
It's not about money for me, either. Up until a few months ago I made precisely 0$ in my life for my art: artofericwayne.com/2023/10/09/0-00-total-money-ive-brought-home-directly-from-my-art-prints-videos-and-blog-in-my-lifetime/
If I were a misogynist, I would say that Germaine demonstrated the debiltating long term effects of estrogen on the cerebral kotex!
Hirst is to Art is what Phil Collins is to Music.
He even looks like him...
Phil Collins could play the drums very well when he was with Genesis. Can sing alright. The musical equivalent of Hirst would hire someone to sing for him, and they would sing lyrics he lifted from somewhere else, and based on an idea he stole.
@@artvsmachine3703Oh God, I laughed at your retort for Phil. Do you think women get away with doing nothing but signing a work? If yes, could you please give me an example? Thanks. The business of art is fascinating to me like staring at an accident scene. I am really glad to have found your channel. Your videos are artistic and educational. To achieve both together is extraordinary.
Yeah. Women have gotten away with the same shenanigans as men in the art world in recent times. Look up Sherry Levine. Yeah. Women have gotten away with the same shenanigans as men in the art world in recent times. Look up Sherry Levine. She's most famous for taking photos of prints of Ed Weston photos and exhibiting the results, which are virtually indistinguishable from the originals. She argues that the act of rephotographing them changes them because the context is different. It's a level of sheer BS that's right up there with the worst of Hirst, Koons, Martin Creed (who exhibited a crumpled piece of paper), or Maurizio Cattelan (who taped a banana to a wall). Yoko Ono infamousy did some rather slight conceptual pieces as well. Also people of color get away with it, too. Contemporary conceptual art and political correctness/wokeness have enormous overlap.
Glad you noticed that my videos are artistic. That makes them subversive in a way because people will want to say that I am so backwards that I only thing painting still lifes is art, or something like that. But anyone who says that is really too dim to even have noticed the video itself is art, and often contains whole breakout interludes of visuals and music...
@@artvsmachine3703 Thank you for the detailed information. I had forgotten about Yoko Ono being called an artist.
The emperor’s new clothes
Love and miss Robert Hughes.
Hirst is a tosser.
Wealth doesn’t buy class, or taste.
Well said - Robert Hughes was a great critic. Hirst is so mediocre as to be not worth bothering with.
Great to hear an art critic finally rip daylight into hog wash art. Much of Damien Hirst art always seemed to me like he thinks: “What gratuitous, vulgar and spectacular crap today can I cough up to win favour, wealth and title with invites to orgies of the most powerful citizens of Ancient Rome”
Perhaps ironically to Germaine Greer's Guardian piece I know of many interior decorators who supply or make Damien Hirst et alia style decorative pieces for cost and a few thousand dollars. Like Hurst they don't have to have originality or soul. They are always fashionable, fit the space perfectly, are the right colours and if they get damaged by visitors, the children, the cleaner or one just gets sick of looking at it, they can just be thrown in the skip.
This "art" couldn't have been what it is without the complicity of the filthy rich.
Don't buy art. Make it.
Damian Hirst's greatest work is his ongoing performance piece "A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted".
Not really. People are getting rich off of investing in his art, flipping it, and playing all sorts of sophisticated games with moving money. If people weren't getting rich off of him, you'd never have heard of him. Down the road the value of his spot paintings for sure with plummet. But that's for the second and third tier suckers who bought them and held on to them. The real players made bank already and will only milk it for as long as they get good returns.
@@artvsmachine3703 but is it art?
Stay tuned for future videos. I'll tackle that later on.
Hurst replaces Warhol as the figurehead of the money racketeering art market system in which there’s plenty of sharks feeding in the abyss. It’s not that rich people are stupid or ignorant, they actively encourage anything which drives up value. It doesn’t really matter what it is just as long as it generates a degree of publicity.
Remember when I first saw Damien Hirsts work while doing my art degree. I wondered what the hell made people even care, I thought it was strange and stupid. Think he took the Duchamp toilet stunt too far down the toilet.
Nailed it!
Have you seen the documentary Blurred Lines? It makes an unimpeachable argument high-end art solely exists for the ultra rich to launder money and avoid taxes.
People like Hirst are elevated not because they have the best ideas. Rather, they are most easily manipulated by these monied interests.
Thank you for refusing to revere shlock just because it’s revered. We need more criticism like this.
Thanks for that, and stay tuned for my upcoming video tackling the legacy of The Fountain. Meanwhile, really appreciate you telling me about "Blurred Lines". I didn't know about it! Looks like you can watch it in HD on RUclips here: ruclips.net/video/Vk5X4MdMuQw/видео.html
Guess what my plans are for later this evening?
@@artvsmachine3703 Excellent! You’re welcome. Look forward to hearing what you think!
Oh, wait. I have seen it, and not too long ago. Just forgot about it somehow. Great stuff, and worth a second viewing!
I saw Hirst’s ‘Pharmacy’ at a gallery in Newcastle many years ago. He’s a man that gets paid handsomely for taking the pish out of art consumers that are too pretentious to know any better.
Absolutely correct! Andy Warhol's bastard (and less talented) son. He and Charles Saatchi hatched a plan to print money... they are both businessmen, nothing else.
Hirst looks like a guy who's won a Euromillions rollover 100 times in a row, but who pretends it was all down to his skill at picking the numbers and nothing to do with a rigged operation.
Damn well put… absolutely nailed it.
‘It’s a fine line between clever and stupid’
Art is often used for tax avoidance. That’s what Damian Hirst pieces are used for.
I saw his exhibition in LA in early 90s. That was it for me and contemporary art.
I remember stumbling upon Damien Hirst's shark at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For all of its fame and controversy it was a work I've wanted to see. Like Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ", Damian Hirst's shark is his "Mona Lisa". I was disappointed. It didn't elicit much from me. It looked sad and wrinkled, rotting away in formaldehyde. It was less of a shock and more of a whimper. The poor shark deserved a dignified burial. As art, the shark was yet another iteration of Duchamp's urinal, after Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Koons. Yawn. I too thought that if this shark were at the Museum of Natural History, no one would notice but, this is art. "Meaning" is contingent upon context. In the context of museum art, the meaning of Hirst's shark is money, lots of money. It was a real shock, however, to see in the same room a small but powerful early painting by Francis Bacon, “Head I". A disembodied head and an animalistic howling mouth with menacing teeth are caught in a ghostly grey torrent and empty black room. "Head l" makes Hirst's shark look as convincing as a plastic toy from Walmart... Robert Hughs was right.
I saw it 20 years ago in Brooklyn. I was neither impressed nor let down. I thought it was OK for what it was.
@@artvsmachine3703 We are in the same boat. I also saw that show. For me, Hirst's stand out piece was his flies in a box...with a cow's head. It was the sculptural manifestation of Francis Bacon and a critique on the purity of modernism and Larry Bell's cubes. Still, the flies works have been dismantled by PETA.
Yes, “A Hundred Years” (1990) is arguably Hirst's best work. And I don't agree with PETA having a showing of it taken down, because the version in question didn't use a real cow's head. I take issue with Damien's killing quite a lot of animals for his art, but I'm not going to get riled up over house flies. I used to raise fruit flies to feed to pet frogs. That said, while I know Bacon was a big influence on Hirst, and I know that there's some overlap in terms of an existential, atheistic insistence on physical mortality, Bacon is one of my very favorite artists, and Hirst one of my least favorite. Hirst's deliberate attempts to do sculptural equivalents of Bacon's work are literalist interpretations that miss all the subtlety and complexity.
Given the marketing angle of Hirst's output that Greer alludes too there is an argument to be made that Saatchi is the actual artist that produced Hirst in the first place which adds further layers of meaningless vacuity to the whole ' I hope and trust' ultimately doomed project. Fascinating in its execution though, as a just an elaborate con. Also it works well as a piece of social engineering when I think on it further.
And these are the same people that think graphic artists/illustrators aren't even "artists"... the temerity is breathtaking.
Thanks for catching on to that. Germaine Greer says as much in her article about what art is. It's anything and everything anyone who calls themselves an artist says it is. The one thing is isn't likely to be at all, according to her, is "picture making." And I think it was Allan Kaprow who argued that the purpose of art is to ask the question, "What is art?," and since painting wasn't asking that question, it wasn't art. And so, that's really the crux of it going back to Duchamp and the war on art and artists. Everything is art except art, and everybody is an artist except artists. I represent artists pushing back on this BS.
I am an artist my art is the use of pastel pencils its form is next to oil paint as it blends really well . I am self taught ,i aim for realism as a photo these days is art nothing and no one can take that away from me that if you cant paint real life as if you was looking at a photo then it isnt art its just a mess on paper of canvas . Art is just that anything less than realism isnt art to me its shit thrown at a wall . I may just do this to make an example of people who claim they are artists . Throw shit at a wall and call it art . Fart .F art .
The YBAs were seized upon by Saatchi and became commodities for trusts and hedgefunds overnight. I guess Hirst had the wherewithal to realise this and has capitalised on it, whereas Tracy Emin still believes she's a genius.
But does Hirst believe he's an uber-genius? Koons believes it about himself. Just look at his blue gazing balls in front of copies of old master paintings series. He said that he "improved them" about the paintings. Neither of them live in reality. I mean, Koons must be surrounded by yes-men if nobody told him that putting gaudy blue gazing balls in front of old master paintings was a ghastly mistake and utter cringe. And Hirst's new Cherry Tree paintings are pure craft that doesn't go beyond Hallmark card level cheesy aesthetics and could easily be taken over, and improved upon, by a Chinese art factory.
I think both those guys sincerely believe they are tied with the best artists who ever lived. Funny how the richest and most famous among us can live in bubbles of cuckoo privilege and lose contact with reality.
give a talented artist some paint and a brush, and they'll paint you a meaningful picture. give a chancer 'artist' some paint and a brush, and they'll smear the paint all over themselves and stick the brush where the sun don't shine, and call it 'performance art'...basically - they do this crud because they can't handle the fact they have no real original and visual talent. 'don't borrow ideas, steal them' - sums it up. how empty he must feel when alone.
I don't like much of Damien Hirst's output... but I don't want to hate him because I find hating someone too passionately will lead to an unhealthy obsession. I would prefer to simply just to leave it alone, and focus on things that give me joy.
The word "hate" doesn't occur in the video. If pressed, I might use the word "despise". But the more appropriate words are "respect" and "admiration," though those apply to Hughes. That said, I agree with your stance on focusing on what you enjoy, but, in order to cultivate one's garden, sometimes one has to extract overgrown weeds
Would it still be art if displayed in the aquarium in Palma, Mallorca?
Damien Hurst is a hack, he's a late 1800s parlor tricks artist.
He was having a fire sale of his art in 2007 that's when I new we were in trouble as a country
I have just created Eternal Questions, its actually a plastic bag
stuck to a tin of peaches, i call it art and value it at 2 million pounds.
I mean if Hirst can get away with this utter shit why shouldn't i?
Well, that's more of a Maurizio Cattelan piece (the guy who taped the banana to a wall), or Martin Creed (crumpled paper on a pedestal). Hirst goes the other direction in terms of humbleness of materials, ex., the diamond-encrusted skull. The reason you can't do it, and no middle or working class or poor person can is that unless you go through the proper channels, you have a lot of connections with rich people, and you are an art world insider, your conceptual art doesn't matter. It's not about how good the work is, but about how it can be positioned in the market. The art world is just about whatever makes the most money. And whatever makes the most money is essentially antithetical to art. That's why we get such extraordinary faceplants.
I have just created Eternal Answers, its a peach inside a plastic bag.
Valued at 4 million pounds. Have we just created a new art form ?
Modern art like this is garbage
Damien Hirst will be remembered for his auctions - not his art
You just single handedly made me want to know more about what Robert Hughes had to say. When art becomes a financial commodity, then he only art we get is the Emperor's New Clothes.
Just found your channel & your videos are brilliant…well done!
😎👏👏
I’ve never liked Hirst’s garbage & it’s really refreshing to finally hear it being called out for what it is: sensationalist tripe.
He’s a very weak artist & is simply a darling of the Cool Britannia nonsense which the establishment was trying to push back in the 90’s. Hughes was perfectly on point. There is little substance once the ‘shock value’ is stripped away from his work👎
My respect to Robert Hughes; and my tremendous disdain to Damien Hirst: a very offensive man.
Hirst is a joke
Always has been
Always will be.
Damien is a perfect expression of the banality of the parasitic culture that spawned him.
If you ask me, the root of the problem with the artist-industrial-complex (to steal a phrase), is the elevation of "theory" over "craft." In so many exhibitions I've seen, the only thing that showed any creativity was the artist's statement, trying to justify some absolutely pitiful-looking, poorly-executed objects.
Right, and the word craft is used pejoratively to dismiss any technical ability or virtuosity. Aesthetics are also on the chopping block. The musical equivalent would be to shun anyone who could play an instrument, especially if the were wildly creative with it. If Jimi Hendrix were an "artist," he'd be considered a laughing stock doing the equivalent of underwater basket weaving. I got a lethal dose of this kind of rhetoric, and this paradigm/belief system when I was in graduate art school. Stay tuned for more videos where I'll address what turns out to be total noxious BS. Next up is Duchamp's urinal.
So my understanding is he is like Kim Kardashian of the art world? 😂
Exactly
I remember seeing the dead animals in boxes in a magazine years ago and was rolling my eyes at the prices they were sold at.
As an artist myself. Every time I feel failure coming on I will watch this video. There is hope for success out there.
I'm with Hughes
When I look at Damien's work for me, with an untrained expert eye, although a great Art lover, I see a novelty artist, out to shock and appease art galleries and art agents rather than free the art inside of him...He is a very good businessman, clever to know his market and produces objects to scrutinise but not feel moved, I feel nothing compared to art that touches me for it's skill, message and impact whether for its beauty or intrigue as a viewer.
An accurate assessment.
For me too, I dont want to offend any artist but I cant compare his work to artists who bear their souls, they are more real@@artvsmachine3703
Hirst has all the time and money he needs to prove to everyone that he can make his own art, but he doesn't do it. He just makes new gimmicks for making money.
would love to see what he is capable of without installations@@artvsmachine3703
Well, he tried his best to make paintings in a Francis Bacon style, minus the gravitas, the struggle with the human condition, or humans. It was not terrible, but not terribly good by a long shot. None of these artists, including Duchamp, were ever very good at drawing or painting.
"Dead predator (self-portrait)"
D. Hirst, 1991
Hirst has had a couple of interesting ideas, though most are stolen from others, but the guy must pinch himself every time he wakes up to make sure he hasn't actually dreamt the fact that he's mysteriously garnered such praise (and money) as an 'artist'...(same as Tracey Eminem)
I'm not sure maintaining a delusion of such magnitude is mentally healthy and that it doesn't have deleterious repercussions.
I'm sure it isn't healthy and you can see the results in Hirst's work which have become more and more vacuous over time. I suspect he should seek medical attention before his psychological state starts to have a physical impact on him.@@artvsmachine3703
There have been studies that show that billionaires are miserable people, obsessed as they are with money, with losing their money (because it is so often ill-begotten), and with some other billionaire having ever more, etc... I'm not sure that superstar, super rich artists whose careers are based on marketing and hype don't or won't become miserable themselves. One of the strange afflictions of the super wealthy is that they end up taking everything for granted, because they can have whatever they want, and so nothing has any value left to it. Everything is just an acquisition. And so it goes that when you have 90 Rolls Royces, like OSHO, you value the fleet less than Ernie down the street values his used Chevy pickup.
I have so many abstract artist friends who breathe sleep and immerse themselves in processing works...Damien's money seems to reduce his work as new merchandise ...there is something intellectually dishonest about the work!...he is a pied-piper for the wealthy dilettantes.
I’m an artist and I make things. If you love it you’ll do it, and you’re not waiting on anyone’s permission - you can’t really care whether it’s fashionable or not.
I love to paint in my free time, simply a hobby. I never attended art school or took art history at university. Funnily enough, I was a business major and have been in marketing for 15 years, and still, the sort of stuff you put on notice here in your videos makes me grimace for those who have something to say or a cultivated talent to share via art.
Love your channel, keep on doing the art lords work!
Cheers.
Germaine Greer is making the EXACT same argument as Robert Hughes, but says it's good instead of bad. Another bad take from her.
He seems like a fairly thick chancer who has been very successful .
Miss Robert Hughes, who was often the only thing worth reading in Time. Him and Richard Schickel
Its really fun to critique modern art, especially these conceptual pieces. Some of this shit is really wild and interesting, but sadly for many people they are only buying the signature attached to the work
Germaine Greer is probably right. Art may very well have degenerated into nothing more than the marketing of vacuous junk. The disturbing thing, however, is that she seems quite proud about it. Even jubilant. What’s there to be jubilant about?
She makes the same argument as Hughes, but claims it's good. Says something about her more than Hughes OR Hirst!
Right. Hughes say's Hirst's shark is ridiculous as art, but a great marketing ploy. She says the same thing, but declares that's what makes it "genius" and "revolutionary".
Brilliant video. It’s a funny thing, but it seems that the most ardent defenders of art like Hirst’s are hardly the buyers or even critics, but status-minded strivers who are desperate to align themselves with the upper echelon. They think they can’t be the butt of the joke if they pretend to understand it - but goading serious engagement with the “art” is the joke itself. The dissenters who they imagine as uncultured hicks, and the billionaires whose purchase patterns they mistake as taste, are the only ones laughing in the end.
Nice work. I think I was more troubled by Greer's statements. The worst kind of cynicism.
The shark doesn’t belong in an art museum.
It belongs in a natural history museum.
I hadn’t heard of Robert Hughes before, but I liked what I saw and cannot help but agree with most of his observations. However, I was very pleased with your approach and the balance you maintained. And the fact that you stated that the balance would be there from the outset. Yet your own observations, rebuttals, critiques were the most interesting part of this video.
Thanks. My next video is about Duchamp's "Fountain," and that one will be chock full of analysis.
what balance? this was incredibly one sided, he just mocked greere and her response to hughes.
@@TheFamousMockingbird : It wasn’t about her. She was just a passing player about whom Mr Mockingbird is entitled to an opinion. The, “balance,” was applied to the two disputants who were the subject of the video, as stated in the introduction.
Hirst will die a rich man, but not as an artist. Then again, maybe that is enough for him. A charlatan who can hoodwink the ignorant regarding ‘Art’.
Would you want to be remembered that way? How many decades before the likes of Hirst and Koons are remembered with utter disgust?
Great work. I'll probably watch this same video again. Soon.
I'll watch it again myself just for the Outer Limits sequence.
The reason that you don't hear anything about the YBAs anymore is because the advertising budget ran out for them, and Saatchi isn't gonna pay for their fame anymore.
They rode that wave up onto the dry sand.
@@artvsmachine3703 in some ways I can't blame them, but could have used that money to develop something really special, as opposed to superficial. As a young man studying art all you'd hear about was the YBAs and frankly their stuff used to bore me, like you said it would be all the hype around it that propelled them forward, but of course Saatchi would want to protect an investment.
Their work is extremely boring if you are a visual artist and not a conceptual artist. It would be like being a musician who loves guitar solos, and then you go to music school and everyone is just appropriating commercial jingles, can't play an instrument, can't read or write music, and you are supposed to get excited about that.
@@artvsmachine3703 as someone who was also a conceptual artist it was also boring as conceptual art. In conceptual art circles there's a phrase 'a one liner', like a one line joke, no real depth apart from what the critiques invent for it, and I've been guilty of that in the past, it's easily done. Many would create art objects and juxtapose items etc and leave the interpretation to critics, or just make up anything when asked about it. Even today I go into galleries and see art that looks like it was made on a budget of £30r less when the artist was given a stipend of £1000 or more, pocketing the rest. I like to see effort, skill and depth, and there's absolutely no reason a conceptual artwork can't also have that.
Yap. Chris Burden's Metropolis I and II are not boring.
He is truly a horrible "artist".
Great video, Eric. If, as Ezra Pound said, the artist is indeed the antennae of the race, then the race is moribund.
Well, are these people really artists, though? Or to what degree are they artists? The biggest names are mostly fraud, with some lackluster ability. If we look to true artists than the race has hope.
A clever thug that realized the overheated art world was the best forum to mug the mindless super rich. His 'work' is outrageously simplistic and cliche. A glorification of the equivalent of three flying ducks pinned to a sitting room wall or a highly polished garden gnome.
“So much money, and so little ability” …..Hirst has always been about gimmick…..never talent.
And the more he does, the more it undercuts any idea that he's an artists with a vision and a style. Rather, he just keeps stealing anything and everything he can, rebranding it, and thinking he's the great amoeba of art. Somewhere the artist in there got lost, and he's become a grain of sand on the beach of his own massively bloated ouvre.
I don’t judge Hirst for churning out junk with a spin on it for the money.
I do judge those who go along with the pretence.
Vacuous nonsense cannot have a deeper meaning unless it’s a reflection on the section of society that professed its greatness.
"Vacuous nonsense cannot have a deeper meaning unless it’s a reflection on the section of society that professed its greatness." And even that "deeper meaning" would come from an outside analysis. The thing we hear with artists like Mauricio Cattelan (banana duct taped art) - that his art is a reflection of our flawed society and perhaps what we deserve - doesn't cut it. Artists can elevate society and not just be complicit with its most selfish and corrupt aspects. Holding a mirror up to a shitty culture is not really doing all that much any good, unless the art itself transcends that shittiness and gives us additional perspective on it. Hirst's work doesn't do that. It's fully complicit.
@@artvsmachine3703 agreed 👍🏻
@@Mekchanoid don’t be sorry 😔
I suppose it depends if there is an intention behind it.
@Mekchanoid "But don't all created things do that, in a sense? Sorry." No. When you get the urge to lump "all created things" into one thimble, remember to pause and ask yourself if you might be overstating your case with extreme simple-mindedness bordering on absolute inanity.
well stated.
As someone once said, its phoney art :- phart.
Me thinks there's been an epidemic of phart.
Let's face it, peak-art was passed when the KLF pointlessly burnt a million quid. Hirst could never think that far, his pocket would get in the way. And don't get me started on Banksy.
Great vid, more please (in fact anything involving a shark puppet will do)!!!!
Just occured to me; if marketing & promotion is the new art according to numbnuts Greer that would make Trump the artistic genius of humanity.
Hirst has a billion? Pft small potatoes.
True. This is also why Warhol's infamous statement that "Business is the best art" is not only a lie, but stupid.
The shark puppet was hilarious!
If we’re talking about him we’ve already lost the game
I hear ya', but, you can't dismantle the paradigm and the dominant narrative crafted by the market and which has hoodwinked the art world at large without addressing the principal players. Meanwhile, if you bothered to watch the video you'd know it's partially about resurrecting commentary by Robert Hughes which has been effectively censored. If we are silent, the dominant discourse wins.
Hirst is not an artist, and he's manipulative🤣🤘
Hirst is brilliant…at making money on shite.
Yeah, and did you notice that is precisely what Greer said his art was, why it was revolutionary, and why it was important?
ugh, Germaine Greer. Now that's a fossil.
Someone once came into my gallery and said her daughter worked for Damien Hirst one Summer before Uni. She was painting the spots for his spot paintings. He did not specify which colours to use and it was normally up to her. So no input from him at all. When she left she asked him if she could have a spot painting for herself. He said to her "Why don't I just give you a cheque for £10,000,"? the implication being that she would just sell it since Hirst already pre-signed the works before the painting was done.
Well, it also signifies that since she already could make one herself, the only reason she'd want one is to sell it. Of course he wanted to control the number and distribution of his products. I don't think Warhol let the guys who did his silkscreens for him sell them off either. Warhol had some good artists working for him, too, including George Condo.
Robert Hughes was a legend. Didn't always agree with him but do this time. Hirst is shit. Simple.
Damien Hirst has no discernible personality and his works are much the same.
Reminded me of the definition of celebrity as people that are famous for being famous.
I hadn't heard that one, or forgot. Great definition.
All Hirst does is say the opposite of what he thinks people want to hear, he is a Fartist.
The artworld is certainly a circus with clowns like these headlining the show.
The famous quote about ' poor artists copy, great artists steal ideas..' gets missused by phonies left & right. Case in point Damien Hirst. He believes it to be a literal instruction, wherein, you just commit copyright infringement. A more intelligent, comprehensive, translation would be: keep your eyes wide open at all times, note things worth stealing and incorporate it into your original artwork with unwaivering conviction that its undeniably true to you.
The "great artists steal" thing is a complete lie. I've researched where it came from, and the meaning is opposite, and much closer to you're interpretation. Here's a comprehensive article I wrote to debunk the BS: artofericwayne.com/2017/01/06/good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal-not-so-fast/
If people are foolish enough to buy this stuff. However, it's the galleries that hype this crap and take their cut.
They aren't foolish necessarily. They are moving money. They aren't buying the pieces to hold on to them indefinitely when everyone probably has a sinking suspicion the prices with tank.
@artvsmachine3703 Yes. Cash dumps. The same with real estate.
Yup. Seems like the super-rich are having some sort of feeding frenzy while they can get away with it, while doing everything they can to insure they can get away with it indefinitely.
@artvsmachine3703 I've said for years these huge ridiculous money pieces are nothing ,but money laundering ! How do you put a price on it
Well, yes. Koons recently had some pieces sent to the moon. And then there's the NFT versions. Looking at the work in question, I could not see it as anything other than collectibles for the super rich. They work says absolutely nothing about Koons himself, whereas IMO the great art is always to some degree a self-portrait in that the artist can't leave his or her imprint on the work. Koons comes out of the Duchampian tradition which wanted to "dehumanize art". My next video will cover this.
Hirst is a grifter of the worst sort.
Triumphantly vacuous sums Damien's career up. His art is shallow memento mori but it makes lots of money, so therefore is wildly, artistically successful by our modern judgement of what makes good art. In the 17th century he would have be making pendants and rings in back alleys and scraping a living. His work says more about us than him and isn't that why he's the most successful artist of our time? At least commercially.
It's about time integrity and beauty stood up to a fake,emboldened and worthless art imposter
alwsys said Hirst and Tracy were sh#t....and that was 30 plus years ago
Damien Hirst is a special kind of 'artist'.... a con artist.
Thanks for that Spinal Tap scene 😅
No problem 😊. I'm a huge fan of Spinal Tap.
...and Cylons
Ew, you must have watched till the very end! Or seen some of my other videos. Cheers!
There’s still a lot of what might be called “small a” art being made. The big names have transcended art, and have become nothing more than commerce.
I think it is ultimately a question of what the artist perceives as art and the common denominator with his client. Damian Hurst says he can sell great things to people, but which of his works is really great? And I think that's what Hughes meant: the art leaves no impression, it's just impressive for its price.
And I think you have to be a certain type of person to sell that type of art. Artists, musicians, etc. often cater to money and power, because they just see it as a business. It takes a certain ignorance to ignore the world and care only about the paycheck. But they can always say they are artists, unpolitical, and most of all: successful.
The very fact that Hirt’s first name is “Damien” is what Scott Adams of Dilbert comic fame would posit “The simulation winking at us”
Wouldn’t the name Hirst be the even more obvious tell? The art world’s Citizen Kane…spelled a little different
@@mazolab Ah, well done!
Hirst's comment, " I'm part of the establishment now. I'm waiting for the next generation to come along and tell me to f*ck off, " kind of sums him up. To me, art isn't about every generation continually negating the previous one. How could culture ever flourish in an atmosphere like that ? This modern mania for "newness" is destroying our souls.
Right! And it's amazing that people can't see through that. Instead, artists can and should build on what went before, like scientists. This thing were we constantly need a radical revolution that rejects all that went before leads to newness for newness sake, and drivel being celebrated as the best our species has to offer. When a urinal is celebrated as the greatest artistic achievement of the 20th century by many experts (Jerry Saltz compared it to the Copernican Revolution and the birth of Christ), we should know something is terribly wrong.
@@artvsmachine3703Do you know why it is considered such an important work?
Because it sells for a lot of money. Everything else is a sales pitch to validate the worth. And everyone falls for it.
@@artvsmachine3703 So no.
Yes. That's why it's important. Everything else is just propaganda and sales pitches to promote it.
It has been like this for many years now , Where the salesmen are classed as "the best artists" If you can get a sponsor and talk a load of sh!*e you will be a successful "artist".
Robert Hughes is fantastic! ❤ Bravo!
Hirst is more of a business man than an artist in my view.
should just change the title to "it's called money laundering"
There's so much more to the video than that, though.
@@artvsmachine3703 sorry, I meant the title of the shark in the tank; I think you reached a similar conclusion with "Apex Art Commodities Inc."
Cool. Thanks for elaborating.
Talk about "the emperors new clothes" so much pretentious shit from the lovey darlings!
The Patron's of Hirst are well-aware that his is NOT art, that's why they collect it. They know that thru him they are insulting TALENT, skill, and the one who bestows these qualities on legitimate artists. The other reason is insurance fraud.
Think about it this way. He made over 1,000 spot paintings, and they each sold for tens of thousands of dollars at bare minimum. Some sold for over a million last I checked, which was a long time ago. How many normal artists would you need to compete with just that series alone in terms of making big money off selling art? And on top of it, each painting took a minimum of time and effort to produce = high profits for high output with minimal production costs. Hirst can make more than 10,000 artists, and has also replaced as many or more.
Look it up yourself.
It's not news, it's just records at auction houses, etc.
Sure. Money laundering and all that. But Hirst got paid, and that's how he can afford all his bling, and to fund new pieces, and hire assistants to make it all for him. What's your problem? You think he didn't get filthy rich off his work?
The shark puppet is art. Hirst is a troll. A troll laughing all the way to the bank.