[DrBenway]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dazzer1975 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I never said art is always beautiful, or indeed that art is not always beautiful, what I said was that those viewing the art will take it to their hearts and minds (or not) and is a purely subjective experience for the consumer/viewer. How you could objectify that process of subjective evaluation is beyond me.

I see your point, and I did misconstrue your use of the "eye of the beholder" argument. I understand that some will have a stronger reaction than others to a particular work. And yes, that reaction, when sincere, may be impossible to objectively describe or quantify.

But aren't there basic ideas that can be brought to bear in answering the question, "is what I am looking at a work of art at all?' If there are no such standards, then I think it becomes impossible to say what is and is not art. It becomes impossible, in fact, to say that there is such a thing as art at all.


Quote:

Originally Posted by dazzer1975 /img/forum/go_quote.gif [...]but when pieces dont fall into particular genre or school then where does that objective standardisation come from? It comes from the art itself which is tearing down old boundaries and constructing new expectations and experiences.

Agreed. Artists who lead, rather than follow, always demolish previous conceptions and establish new ones. But I would argue that when the dust settles, and the screams of outrage die away, it turns out that the new ideas inevitably fit into age-old philosophical ideas of what constitutes art. I don't think that issues of technique, or of figuration vs. abstraction have much to do with that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dazzer1975 /img/forum/go_quote.gif All the objectification in the world doesn't stand for crap when someone turns up to the auction rooms with ten million in their back pocket and absolutely must have that piece because it communicates something to them...And that's the point, it is in the eyes, hearts and minds of the beholder.

The elephant in the room here is greed. When works of art somehow become investment properties, worth tens of millions of dollars, the market is infiltrated by buyers who don't give a rat's ass about art, or responding to it emotionally. They are looking to turn a profit, and they think they have come across a jolly good way of doing so. Any sort of personal connection with the canvas/sculpture/installation is purely coincidental.

So artists like Hirst see their stars, and the values of their work, rising in the art world simply because people who don't care about art are betting that they can make money by trading in it. I actually think Hirst's platinum skull either comments on this, or panders to it. I'm not sure which.

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidhunternyc /img/forum/go_quote.gif Recently I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City. I was in the 20th century wing and in this one room there was Damien Hirst's, "Dead Shark", and a painting by Francis Bacon titled, "Head 1", done in 1949. The juxtaposition of the two works of art was appropriate considering that Hirst comes out of Bacon (which Hirst himself has acknowledged). The Hirst sculpture looked rather sedate and common, something you might see at a natural history museum. In comparison, the painting by Bacon, completed some 50 years before the Hirst work, looked shocking and immanent. Being a painter, I am biased towards this idea from Jasper Johns; "It is not what you say, but how you say it." Francis Bacon knew how to say what he pictured. I don't believe Hirst is in the same league.

Either do I (now there's a shock). And, if I understand your point, it is indeed possible to make objective judgements about one work vs. another.

 

[davidhunternyc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrBenway /img/forum/go_quote.gif Artists who lead, rather than follow, always demolish previous conceptions and establish new ones. But I would argue that when the dust settles, and the screams of outrage die away, it turns out that the new ideas inevitably fit into age-old philosophical ideas of what constitutes art. I don't think that issues of technique, or of figuration vs. abstraction have much to do with that.

Nicely put, and when the dust settles, artists such as Vermeer and Chardin emerge, glowing in the sun.
"Grandiosity grows so tiring." - Giorgio Morandi

 

[FalconP]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shigzeo /img/forum/go_quote.gif but hasn't art in a way always been about that? i understand that many artists are broke or poor and hungry but if you can manage to manipulate people's heart or money strings as well as your work, then why not work that angle? after all, we live in a world of global domination by very capitalist oriented nations. art has no other way but to follow the economy

The "elite" art market has fed a number of artists, but the ones who got lucky are usually those who base their works on human taboos: sex, death, and politics (religion is tricky: many of the monied class are deeply pious and easily offended). One may accuse Hirst for exploiting human fetishes, but he is not the worst case in my book (at least he is diverse). That honor goes to a certain contemp Chinese painter (who shall remain unnamed, but those in tune with the market will know about this guy). Apparently this "artist" only knows how to paint one hideous image, and on each painting he paints this same image on different backgrounds. The art crowd certainly has no problem with this seemingly-done-by-factory malarkey: not only did his "works" fetched top prices in auction houses; you can find "reproductions" of his image in the cheap night markets in Hong Kong. Why are his "paintings" so revered? Because, people say, of their "ironic" "subversive" political subtext. Politics sells, especially when you are a good-for-nothing Chinese artist.

But humanity is not just about taboos; there are so many art-worthy subjects to explore. Unfortunately artists who choose other subjects will have a harder time gaining recognition.

 

[Planar_head]

Quote:

Originally Posted by FalconP /img/forum/go_quote.gif The "elite" art market has fed a number of artists, but the ones who got lucky are usually those who base their works on human taboos: sex, death, and politics (religion is tricky: many of the monied class are deeply pious and easily offended). One may accuse Hirst for exploiting human fetishes, but he is not the worst case in my book (at least he is diverse). That honor goes to a certain contemp Chinese painter (who shall remain unnamed, but those in tune with the market will know about this guy). Apparently this "artist" only knows how to paint one hideous image, and on each painting he paints this same image on different backgrounds. The art crowd certainly has no problem with this seemingly-done-by-factory malarkey: not only did his "works" fetched top prices in auction houses; you can find "reproductions" of his image in the cheap night markets in Hong Kong. Why are his "paintings" so revered? Because, people say, of their "ironic" "subversive" political subtext. Politics sells, especially when you are a good-for-nothing Chinese artist. But humanity is not just about taboos; there are so many art-worthy subjects to explore. Unfortunately artists who choose other subjects will have a harder time gaining recognition.

Agreed. People either are out to make money, or if the artist so desires, to attract attention for the work they do. Whether or not that attention is deserved is another question altogether, and is up for interpretation.

 

[DrBenway]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Planar_head /img/forum/go_quote.gif Agreed. People either are out to make money, or if the artist so desires, to attract attention for the work they do. Whether or not that attention is deserved is another question altogether, and is up for interpretation.

Edit: This is a distillation of what started out as a rambling, internally contradictary post (Me? Never!)


But doesn't that amount to little more than shrewd pandering when an artist sees an opportunity to prosper through some sort of appeal to the money, and goes straight for it? To me, a true artist is guided by his or her artistic vision first, and everything else, second.

I might even go so far as to say that people like Hirst are legitimate as entertainers, and, as we know, entertainers make the big bucks. Maybe he could float David Blaine in formaldehyde...what am I bid?

 

[Planar_head]

The problem is who is the entertainer, and who is the entertained?

I think the people who pay big bucks for work like that is the entertainer, and the entertained is those who watch and the artist that created it.

 

[oicdn]

I went to an art show ONCE. The reason ONCE? Because my friend was in it. He does REMARKABLE pieces, far more intricate and complex than anything else I saw there. Yeah, I may be a little biased, but even just from an artist POV, his work was definitely up there.

Now I'm not knocking abstract artists, but I DO knock these fad type artist who fly by with some "great works" and you never hear of again because they hire a ridiculously priced publicist for this event to bank on. But seriously, some of the **** people convey is just garbage, and more often than not, you have these really shallow people defending it with some REALLY VAGUE responses like davidhunternyc gave examples of. The responses don't even really rebut back to what you said, rather, it's an insult? Insult? Do they even know the person? What, it's an opinion that YOU asked of me!!!

So, I tend to avoid those things like the plague, as most of those aficionados aren't even artistic themselves, they just have a large bankroll with the large wall space to match.

Maybe I'm just jealous I didn't throw some crap on a canvas, or dump crap into a container and enter it into an art show to make millions. Probably.

 

[davidhunternyc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by oicdn /img/forum/go_quote.gif Now I'm not knocking abstract artists, but I DO knock these fad type artist who fly by with some "great works" and you never hear of again because they hire a ridiculously priced publicist for this event to bank on. But seriously, some of the **** people convey is just garbage, and more often than not, you have these really shallow people defending it with some REALLY VAGUE responses like davidhunternyc gave examples of. The responses don't even really rebut back to what you said, rather, it's an insult? Insult? Do they even know the person? What, it's an opinion that YOU asked of me!!!

The frustrating part of my experience, is that at that dinner I had, those other artists are considered the modern masters of our time. I have the utmost respect for them. Then there was myself, not yet a footnote in art history, feeling the pressure to tow the party line. These artists, on one hand, have created their work with such complexity and beauty, yet on the other hand, were so blunt in their response to my open-ended thoughts about Matthew Barney. Now that these artists are part of the establishment, the bridge gets drawn up and the garrets are fiercely defended. I was a threat. It still confounds me.

 

[DrBenway]

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidhunternyc /img/forum/go_quote.gif The frustrating part of my experience, is that at that dinner I had, those other artists are considered the modern masters of our time. I have the utmost respect for them. Then there was myself, not yet a footnote in art history, feeling the pressure to tow the party line. These artists, on one hand, have created their work with such complexity and beauty, yet on the other hand, were so blunt in their response to my open-ended thoughts about Matthew Barney. Now that these artists are part of the establishment, the bridge gets drawn up and the garrets are fiercely defended. I was a threat. It still confounds me.

It may be an apocryphal story, but I have read that Philip Glass drove a cab to make ends meet after completing his composition studies at Juliard, despite having been offered prestigious academic positions. He felt, the story goes, that he would be under heavy pressure to conform to prevailing trends and fashions in composition, none of which his work had much to do with. Only by distancing himself from the establishment was he able to develop his unique approach and vision.

Of course, classical minimalism now constitutes a sort of orthodoxy of its own, and I have actually heard Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams to one degree or another distance themselves from the minimalist label.

The notion of inside vs outside in any art form is a very slippery, mutable, and political concept, especially with the passage of time.

 

[orkney]

Interesting poll, and perhaps not so far afield after all, given this community's basis in music.

I did my graduate work in the UK in the late 90s/early noughties and my partner then was a curator who worked at the Saatchi Gallery, ground zero for the YBAs, from The Chapman Brothers to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas to Hirst. They were as a group brash, rude, sharp, entrepeneurial and media-savvy, not surprising given their common origins in the East End artist's culture of the time, built around artist-run galleries and shows run like raves. It was exciting and raw, and some of these artists were genuinely talented (Jenny Saville, John Currin) and some were terrific salespeople (Emin, Hirst).

I think Hirst is an artist in Warhol's mode, though without AW's skills as a draftsperson, illustrator, etc. He's clever and aggressive and has an eye for the monumental in his installations, and sometime gets it right -- Thousand Years and Possibility are very effective pieces, in my view, but neither cuts very deep. So he's influential, and thus expensive, but I doubt his fame will be based on his skills as an artist or thinker, which I'd say are pretty modest. A good artist for his times, and here's hoping better and smarter ones keep coming along.

So, a visionary businessman and a very average artist.

best,

o

PS: having met him on several occasions, he's a raving c*kehead and drinker and very charismatic. Lives the part in a big way, or least did.

 

[DrBenway]

Quote:

Originally Posted by orkney /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think Hirst is an artist in Warhol's mode, though without AW's skills as a draftsperson, illustrator, etc.

That's an awful lot to leave aside. Warhol brought real skills, training, and ideas to the table. I still remember the first time I saw his silk screen of Marilyn Monroe at MOMA. It wasn't part of a specific show; it was just there, hanging on the wall, and I stood and stared at it for the better part of half an hour. It was poignant and unsparing at the same time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by orkney /img/forum/go_quote.gif So, a visionary businessman and a very average artist.

I think that's perfect; there can be no doubt that he has figured out how to enrich himself while looking fabulous. His "work?" A very different story.

I'm intrigued by your reminiscence of the origins of the scene that bore him, though. I lived in the East Village in the mid-80s, when there were still tiny galleries and unlicensed clubs on every other block. They have all long since been swept away, but the financial industry pros who can afford to live there now love to warm themselves in the long dead glow of that culture.

Hirst's patrons do the same thing. That's a big part of what he trades in, in my opinion.

 

[Sherwood]

I've been to Saatchi's gallery when he was in full YBA mode more than once, and greatly enjoyed it.

Obviously, at least to me, Saatchi is the kingmaker here. Regardless of my opinion on Hirst (whose works on display I enjoyed about 50/50), I have a very high opinion of the gallery itself. Taken not as individual pieces, the monumentality or Hirst's pieces like "...impossibility..." gave the entire gallery a natural history museum feel, which really complemented the rest of the works there.

I was fascinated by the amount Hirst's works went for, since I considered the YBAs to be a bygone era. I can't imagine how you would display those works any better than Saatchi did.

As far as objective measures of the quality of art, I feel there must be some. I also feel that real market value must, necessarily, be one of them, as callous as it sounds.

My opinion on Hirst aside (I voted the former), I really appreciate the prominence Saatchi gave Peter Doig, whose work absolutely entranced me before I ever knew who he was. I fell in love with art thanks to that gallery, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. I can't imagine how frustrating the art world must be to insiders, but to an avowed outsider the modern art world is accessible, intriguing, and just fantastic enough to be otherworldly. Spectacles like the one we saw at Sotheby's just reinforce the idea in the minds of the public that "good" art is pure unobtainium, and as denizens of a high-end forum we can all understand the allure of such a thing.

 

[davidhunternyc]

The New York Times

After the Roar of the Crowd, an Auction Post-Mortem

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: September 19, 2008

So did Damien Hirst shift the paradigm or just make lots of noise, money and news? And is that good or bad? The opinions swarmed, as “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” the two-day auction of Mr. Hirst’s new work that Sotheby’s staged in London this week, made $200.7 million for the artist and the auction house

Knee-deep in tea leaves, the event set lots of people spinning in different tizzies. But beyond the spectacle that is Mr. Hirst’s art, life and career, none of it means much. The auction’s success doesn’t even say a lot about the non-Hirst part of the art market, although everyone in it was glad the sale didn’t fail.

The reaction to the auction and its contents has run the gamut from doomsday end-of-civilization laments and serves-you-right righteousness directed at the art world, to the crowning of Mr. Hirst as superartist and speaker of deep truths (mostly in the essays in Sotheby’s lavish three-volume catalog), to complete indifference, feigned or otherwise, on the part of many dealers.

Bears have come out of the woods, most conspicuously the critic Robert Hughes, railing with customary vigor against Mr. Hirst as he railed against Julian Schnabel in the 1980s. Mr. Hughes wrote that Mr. Hirst’s famous sculpture of a dead shark would be more interesting if the artist had caught the shark himself, which may be a somewhat exaggerated reaction to the Conceptual Art infrastructure of Mr. Hirst’s otherwise quite physical art.

It’s amazing how many people behave as if, until quite recently, art and money have always been on opposite sides of some ethical bundling board, as if they have not always been intimately connected. Artists have to survive, and they make art to be sold; that’s one of the positive reactions they want for their work. They are among those people lucky and industrious enough to live, often extremely well, by doing something they love passionately, which is everyone’s goal. And artists have always had a big say in how they do business and get exposure.

Such instincts caused Manet and Courbet to mount public exhibitions of their work (in tents) in 19th-century Paris. As one British writer pointed out this week, at around the same time the Victorian painter William Holman Hunt bypassed the usual arrangement of selling art through the Royal Academy to work directly with dealers. More recently these instincts have generated alternative spaces and artist-run galleries as well as inspiring many artists, like Mr. Hirst, to work separately with different dealers around the world, rather than funneling all arrangements through a single “home” gallery.

Mr. Hirst pooh-poohs dealers and their 50 percent commission because he can. He has always excelled at running his career and garnering publicity, fusing his art, his life and his business arrangements into a single ball of wax. He is a classic self-starter and scenemaker, quick to take things into his own hands, as he did with the 1988 “Freeze” exhibition, which introduced a new generation of artists before galleries or museums had any inkling of them. That show also initiated an entirely new British art scene, and Mr. Hirst remains the Atlas on whose shoulders this scene still rests, as he regularly reminds everyone.

His restaurant, the auction of its contents and his recent diamond-covered skull are of a piece with the London sale, as others have noted. So is his 2005 show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Its dozens of slovenly realist paintings executed by assistants demonstrated Mr. Hirst’s selling power and his assembly-line working methods while making the gallery look amazingly sleazy, all of which was the point.

The art market is to Mr. Hirst as popular culture is to artists like Jeff Koons: his main content. Mr. Hirst revels in revealing its machinery and making it jump through hoops. In this sense he has gotten the most mileage out of the commodity-minded tactics of the late-1980s trendlet known here as Neo-Geo, with its shiny surfaces, expensive materials and startling rearrangements of pieces of reality.

Artists who excel at running their own careers usually fail to see the point of dealers, even though no one, except artists, risks more in the art world. And, unlike the chief executives of many American corporations, when dealers fail their reward is to close up shop, usually without much in the way of golden parachutes. Mr. Hirst claims, fatuously, that he is “democratizing” art, but he is really just expanding his client base to buyers who don’t know much about art.

Interestingly, the pre-auction world tour did not include a stop at Sotheby’s in New York, although a meager selection of dot paintings was exhibited in Bridgehampton. Neither Sotheby’s nor Mr. Hirst is interested in American collectors: their money may be losing value, but they may also know better.

Going by the catalog, the 223 works in the auction were familiar if not banal, compared with the sale’s totality as performance art. They look calculatedly safe and aimed to please in their recycling and refining of a careful selection of previous ideas. (No rotting cows’ heads and flies in big glass cases, for example.) He and his staff of 200 added butterflies to the spin paintings, which are now sometimes shaped like hearts. They amped up the biblical symbolism of the dead animals with the addition of gold and the usual ham-handed but effective titles. And previous Hirst works continue to be reincarnated on canvas.

“Young Damien,” for example, is a new painting based on one of my favorite Hirsts: a black-and-white photograph titled “With Dead Head” (1981 to 1991) that shows him bending over, his grinning face cheek to cheek with that of a cadaver who could easily have been his grandfather. The image says everything about Mr. Hirst’s gleeful embrace of life’s nastier aspects, of corpses and decay, and most of all of death, and about his desire to shock, his charm and his love of playing the bad boy. It also has the energy and optimism of his best work.

All these feelings seem to swirl around the auction. But as has been increasingly the case, they pertain almost exclusively to Damien World, a self-enclosed parallel art universe whose best product may be, as with Joseph Beuys but not Andy Warhol, Mr. Hirst himself.

Outside of Damien World, the auction’s most interesting evidence is less about the growing, “democratized” art market than about the fragmentation inherent in globalism. The art world can expand only so far before it splinters, and that disintegration has started. Whether they are named China, Moscow, Christie’s or Damien World, the various kingdoms of the art world are multiplying into slightly overlapping, more or less provincial spheres, which may have always been the case.

And Mr. Hirst may simply have morphed into the Thomas Kincaid of contemporary art, running a factory that produces major, minor and starter Hirsts. Eventually he will probably cut the auction houses out of the deal, too.

 

[DrBenway]

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidhunternyc /img/forum/go_quote.gif The New York Times After the Roar of the Crowd, an Auction Post-Mortem By ROBERTA SMITH Published: September 19, 2008 So did Damien Hirst shift the paradigm or just make lots of noise, money and news? And is that good or bad?[...]

I read this piece when it hit Nytimes.com, and I just re-read your post of it. My reaction, both times, was that she doesn't answer her own question. She says some bitingly critical things about him and his work, and she says some very positive things about him and his work. I get absolutely no sense of critical perspective from this article. Is his work great? Is his work terrible?

As she says, "And is that good or bad?"

She doesn't answer her own question, which makes this article a dodge, in my opinion. I think someone in her position should be brave enough to take an explicit stand. That's what critics are supposed to do. I think there are a lot of people with a stake in the art world, including critics, who are afraid to point out that the emperor is naked.

Thanks for posting it though; I'm glad I re-read it.

 

[davidhunternyc]

"Going by the catalog, the 223 works in the auction were familiar if not banal, compared with the sale’s totality as performance art. They look calculatedly safe and aimed to please in their recycling and refining of a careful selection of previous ideas."

Your point is well taken. I think the above two sentences are really the only critical things that Roberta Smith says about Hirst's work. I could see why, with the fury surrounding Hirst's work, that Smith's comments are a little bit like dancing around a volcano. I too was actually excited when I first picked up the paper and turned to this article. I may not always agree with Roberta Smith, but she always drops the ax somewhere in her reviews. It can be entertaining and she can be severe. So I was a bit surprised at the conflicted nature of this review. And a bit tepid, wouldn't you say? I don't know if that is because she doesn't dare confront a cultural phenomenon as big as Damien Hirst or because she too is conflicted about his work. Perhaps the point of the article was to look at Hirst not as an individual artist but as a force in the art market, maybe even just a reflection of commerce in general. In a way, I understand her trying to distance herself a little bit. Instead of judgement, why not observation? I think this is actually the first article she has ever written where she adopts this kind of distancing from her subject. You said "dodge" and you might be right. I myself do not think that Damien Hirst is a great artist but I won't knock him either. I agree with Roberta Smith when she gives artists such as Hirst kudos for figuring out a way to be "industrious enough to live, often extremely well, by doing something they love passionately." There is no romance or glory in suffering, despite what the silly movies say about Vincent Van Gogh. The only other comment I have about this review is that Roberta Smith writes a tremendous amount of material for the New York Times. This is a newspaper article, not "Fear and Trembling." I don't think her words were meant to be too closely examined. Though she is a powerful voice in the art world, I look at her writing with a grain a salt. It is what it is and no more. As an artist myself, I look at the work of Damien Hirst and naturally try to evaluate how my work measures up to his. This is natural behavior for all artists. I believe my work is superior, however, no one has ever heard of me. Like I said before, if I died today I wouldn't even be a footnote in art history. Also, every day at my menial job I am degraded by my customers and managers and the last time I went to the hospital, I wasn't even given a shot to numb parts of my body before the doctors performed a very painful procedure. Since I do not have health insurance, the state has deemed numbing medication an unnecessary expense. So I will say it again. There is no glory in suffering. I can not and will not look at Damien Hirst and judge him for his success. Life isn't fair. And if Damien Hirst has figured out a way to stack the odds in his favor, God bless him for it. He has done so ingeniously. I haven't figured that out yet. I hope I will some day.