Ultimately, all this was about big money. Just like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, Damien Hirst knew how exactly to tap the big, corporate market. He is probably the richest artist there has ever been, and in September 2008, just as world markets collapsed, he sold works worth
£111 million at a Sotheby’s auction.
The Telegraph's Peter Oborne comes to bury Damien Hirst and to praise David Hockney. Oborne doesn't know whether Hockney is a big C Conservative, but asserts that he's certainly a conservative painter, whilst the "progressive" Damien Hirst was the closest thing New Labour had to an officially approved ambassador for Cool Britannia.
It's not often that I find myself thinking like Peter Oborne, but I actually found myself nodding in agreement in quite a few places. I respect the fact that Hockney has painstakingly acquired the skills of his craft, whereas Hirst seems to be all managerialist vision, subcontracting out the skills and hard work needed to actually realise that vision to anonymous artisans, then hoovering up the cash and celebrity for himself. I remember seeing some of Hirsts pencil sketches once and thinking that that this guy either couldn't draw, or just wasn't trying very hard.
And I do like the fact that Hockney respects his audience, that he takes an interest in making sure his paintings are hung high, so everybody gets a good look.
So unlike the home life of our own dear Damien, who was too busy trying to flog pieces like Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything, that his assistants had made earlier, to gilded members of the overclass like Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton* to worry about whether the little people were getting a good view. Exclusive art for very exclusive people.
Even the concepts are exclusive. Be honest, you don't even know what Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything is about, do you? That's because Hirst's a clever multi-millionaire and you're just a peasant.
I must admit that I have the occasional twinge of regard for Hirst (there are more ways to express yourself than putting pigment on canvas and anyone who doesn't think it's jaw-droppingly awesome for an artist to actually get one of his paintings sent to Mars must be dead inside) but, on the whole, I agree with Oborne that he's an over-hyped BS merchant, the product of a society that values self-belief, self-promotion and money over the less showy attributes of skill, diligence, questioning, observation and patience, And I don't for one second buy the argument that pieces like his diamond-encrusted skull make Hirst an outsider, making an ironic critique of our shallow, materialistic society. 'I was doing it in an ironic way' is just 'the dog ate my homework', sent to art college. Hirst's definitely inside that particular tent, pissing out.
As far as the narrow point about Hockney Vs. Hirst goes, I can't find much to disagree with. The wider lessons that Oborne draws from the comparison don't really stand up, though. The idea that all conservative, traditional art is an intrinsically Good Thing and difficult, "progressive" art is A Bad Thing doesn't stand the briefest scrutiny. For a start, half of the "great art" in our galleries was initially derided for being "difficult" modern rubbish. Even such firmly middle-of-the-road-National-Trust-notebook-cover-fodder as Monet and the Pre-Raphaelites was once thought daringly avant garde and "progressive". Not to mention the fact that the world's most notorious tyrants seem to have liked their art understandable, representational and artistically conservative - think the Stalinist school of Socialist Realism, not to mention (Godwin's Law alert) a certain frustrated artist from Austria who had major issues with progressive (or as he called it "degenerate") art.
Oborne's political pop at New Labour has some truth in it but it's also deeply disingenuous. Yes, people like Mandelson were 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich', when they should have been intensely worried about the economy-busting pyramid schemes that were enriching the few. But in a not-too-difficult-to-imagine counter-factual world where the Conservatives were in power at the height of the boom, does anybody seriously think that the post-Thatcherite party of the free market would have behaved any differently? If it'd been the Tories in power, nobody would have even bothered to come up with the 'intensely relaxed' sound bite - everybody would have assumed that the Tories were in favour of that sort of thing anyway.
Hirst's over-priced, over-hyped art is certainly emblematic of a gilded age of excess that's crashing down around our ears, but anyone who thinks that the madness was purely the fault of the New Labour and that we're now entering a blessed era of Conservative stability and sanity is living in cloud cuckoo-land. Despite failure on a superhuman scale, the all-party neo-liberal consensus that presided over the disaster is still in place.
If ever a financial order deserved a 30s-style repudiation, this one did. Its gods were false. Its taste was bad. Its heroes were oafs and brutes and thieves and bullies. And all of them failed, even on their own stunted terms.
Still the skull-faced God of greed glitters and grins down at us.
*I'm not actually sure whether M. Arnault eventually acquired the Hirst he was haggling for, but with a job title like that, you can be sure he was one of the select few who could afforded the exorbitant asking price
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