CULTURE SHOCK:Damien Hirst's talent is for decorative spectacle adn his genius for marketing. So why does everyone pretend that a smart shark-oil salesman is the Picasso of our age, writes Fintan O'Toole
WITH ITS USUAL spirit of public-mindedness, this column has a suggestion that will not merely save the Government money in these straitened times, but actually turn a drain on the public finances into a money-maker. The Natural History Museum, the "dead zoo" so poignantly posed beside the Dáil, is literally falling down. The cost of restoring the building to a condition of safety will be considerable.
So here's a simple plan. Lift the phone to Damien Hirst's agent and hand the whole thing over to the English artist. At his auction in London this week, Hirst was knocking down dead animals in formaldehyde for £10 million a pop. The museum has thousands of dead animals in cases and jars, some of them, like the one with a big fish with the frog that choked it sticking out of its mouth, much more interesting than Hirst's carcasses. We could do a deal - rename the museum something suitably pretentious like Nature's Tears for the Death of Time and flog the stuff off to Russian billionaires. We'll take half the proceeds, and Hirst can have the other half, not for doing anything, but for the one bit of him that isn't worthless - his brand name. With our share, we could finally fund the arts in Ireland to a decent level for the next decade.
This suggestion is not entirely facetious. Hirst's work is that, not of a serious artist, but of an exhibitor of curiosities. He has a very good eye for the weird and the grotesque. The sensation he creates is "Oh, look at that thing over there", not "what is this object doing?" His are the aesthetics of the freak show and the funfair, of the prize at the parish fete for the most suggestive-looking carrots. He has talent and even genius - the only problem being that the talent is for decorative spectacle and the genius for marketing. But as an artist, he is frankly rubbish. Art is about transformation; Hirst is merely about display.
In itself, there is nothing especially objectionable about a chancer parting fools from their money, and the hedge-fund managers and gawky oligarchs who have made him a dollar billionaire deserve all they get. The real question is why Hirst has been so indulged by the art establishment. Why do great institutions such as the Tate Modern in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York put him in collections alongside Mark Rothko or Francis Bacon? Why has it taken the indefatigable Robert Hughes to stand up and point out that the imperial personage is in the all-together? There are, I think, two reasons. The first is the weakness of critics and curators - a weakness rooted in fear. Something happened to public discourse about the arts in the early years of high modernism either side of 1900. Across art forms, critics made eejits of themselves. Establishment taste had a terrible time with the successive waves of high modernism - the impressionists were talentless daubers, Ibsen and Joyce were pornographers, Matisse was eccentric and incoherent, and so on. Many critics lived to see themselves remembered only as absurd bit-part players in the heroic struggles of genius, the fools who tried to stand in its way with their ignorance and prejudice.
The fear of being that fool became part of the DNA of modernist, and even more of post-modernist, art. In the political economy of taste, it is more costly to err by missing the next wave than by hyping up a mediocrity. The mediocrity, after all, will be forgotten with time, and so will your embarrassing encomiums. But the misunderstood genius will be remembered for a long time, and so too will your fatuous attacks. Critics and curators are so afraid of being wrong that they allow hype to reach a point where it suits everyone to pretend that a smart shark-oil salesman like Hirst is the Picasso of our age.
The second problem lies in the very nature of conceptual art. The conceptual movement can be understood as a double reaction. It reacted against the commodification of art by galleries and collectors by suggesting that the artistry lies not in an object but in an idea. And it reacted against Walter Benjamin's "age of mechanical reproduction", in which the uniqueness of a painting or a sculpture is diluted by the mass production of photographic images, by demystifying the art object itself.
The first great icon of the movement, Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal, bought in the Paris marketplace and exhibited at the Dadaist show in 1922, did all of this at once. It made fun of the gallery and collectors; it drew attention to the potential beauty of everyday objects; and it suggested to viewers that something becomes art because they decide, in a given context, to see it as such.
Damien Hirst, of course, sells out all of these ideas. He sends commodification into overdrive. He doesn't raise questions about the nature of art and the artist - if he did, those questions would be especially awkward for himself. And instead of inviting viewers to think, he sprays on a pseudo-mystical, cod-religious aura with his pompous titles. But he does exploit the gap that conceptualism has opened up between art and skill.
Some conceptual art remains rooted in physical proficiency as well as in abstract ideas. But that physical knack is no longer a necessary precondition for visual art. This makes it possible for someone like Hirst, with no demonstrable competence, to be an "artist". More importantly, it leaves consumers with a fundamental uncertainty about the difference between a work of art and any other object that incites curiosity or interest. We need to remind ourselves, and to be reminded by critics and curators, that the difference is that art doesn't package the materials it uses, it fundamentally changes them.