In anticipation of the exhibition (April 4th to September 9th of this year) by Damien Hirst at Tate Modern in London, the Tate put together a
video, shown on its YouTube channel, in which curator Ann Gallagher and the artist walk through the rooms and discuss the artworks together.
The art is a retrospective of the artist's past three decades:
8 Pans — a row of eight coloured saucepans (whose gloopy paint makes them look like cakes of the acrylic paint which normally comes in squeezable plastic bottles) from the 80s which Hirst confesses he doesn't think so much of now; tanks with animals preserved in liquid, vaguely psychedelic turning wheels of paint colours which run and expand like fragmented rays of sunshine to the rims, a roomful of live butterflies with a double curtain of clear plastic streamers at the doorways so that the lepidoptera aren't lost, a regimented and overlarge replica of the shelves and superminimalist counter in a
pharmacy, a huge disc encrusted with flies; and so on.
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In the Turbine Hall there is (not shown in the Gallagher-Hirst film but in a
second film of its own) the diamond-encrusted skull which, since the artist
originally demanded the famously immense price of 50 million British pounds for it, has been cited as a leading exemplar of the subjective pricing of any art and particularly of modern art — where it is arguably difficult to tell how much thought and feeling and work have gone into something, in the absence of the innumerable brushstrokes and details and generally noble (undemocratic?) aesthetic of any classic canvas from a medieval altar triptych to the impressionists.
("I made the skull," he told Anita Singh of the
Daily Telegraph,
because in a situation where there was all this money being made, I wanted to make something about the money. When you're in a position where you have made loads and loads of money, it should be used to make art rather than letting it pile up.)
The making of the skull itself is outsourced to Bentley & Skinner,
a jeweller's at 55 Piccadilly Street in London, whose employed are shown in the Tate's short film drilling holes into the platinum frame and then placing the crinkly diamonds — there are 8,601 all told — in them. At the forehead of the skull (which is a cast of a true old skull) there is an enormous tear-drop shaped diamond, fringed by middling-sized ones, as an ornament like a comic book deity's 'mindstone.' It and the music in the background of the video and the richness are oddly reminiscent of Karl Lagerfeld's
Paris-to-Bombay fashion collection in December — which was at once the height of awkward taste in a time where the questionable solvency of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc., were vexing the souls of Europe, and Britain across the Channel was already suffering under budget cuts to alleviate the tremendous government debt, and the United States was still twisting under its own financial shortcomings and political budget debate, all of these things being the metaphorical skeleton at the feast — and strangely compelling.
So it is helpful to hear in the video what Hirst was thinking, by and large, when he conceived the divers installations.
Painting: Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (ca. 1640), by Georges de La Tour
in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons
It is arguable by prejudiced persons like me that Hirst's memento mori is in better taste than this rather kitschily dramatic though often-loved painting, which is one of several with the gloomy candle-phile Mary Magdalene motif.
