Damien Hirst on 9/11

Hirst on 9/11
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.gossip.celebrities/browse_thread/thread/2aea1fb054cd3c0f/9f2810671ae188f8?hl=en&lnk=st&q=damien+hirst
The 1999 Sensation Exhibit mentioned in the above article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensation_exhibition
Hirst on wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst
Hirst on art:

Hirst sees the real creative act as being the conception, not the execution, and that, as the progenitor of the idea, he is therefore the artist:

“

Art goes on in your head," he says. "If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down. Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings. There are on-going ideas I've been working out for years, like how to make a rainbow in a gallery. I've always got a massive list of titles, of ideas for shows, and of works without titles.

on Appropriation:

ppropriation

In 2000, Hirst was sued for breach of copyright over his sculpture, Hymn, which was a 20 foot, six ton, enlargement of his son Connor's 14" Young Scientist Anatomy Set, designed by Norman Emms, 10,000 of which are sold a year by Hull-based toy manufacturer Humbrol for £14.99 each. Hirst paid an undisclosed sum to two charities, Children Nationwide and the Toy Trust in an out-of-court settlement. The charitable donation was less than Emms had hoped for.^[9]

In 2006, a graphic artist, Robert Dixon, stated Hirst's print Valium had "unmistakable similarities" to one of his own designs. Hirst's manager contested this by explaining the origin of Hirst's piece was from a book The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry (1991)—not realising this was where Dixon's design had been published.^[25]

Spiritus Callidus #2 by John Lekay, 1993, crystal skull

In 2007, artist John LeKay said he was a friend of Damien Hirst 1992–1994 and had given him a "marked-up duplicate copy" of a Carolina Biological Supply Company catalogue, adding "You have no idea how much he got from this catalogue. The Cow Divided is on page 647 – it is a model of a cow divided down the centre, like his piece." This refers to Hirst’s work Mother and Child, Divided—a cow and calf cut in half and placed in formaldehyde.^[25] LeKay also claimed Hirst had copied the idea of For the Love of God from LeKay's crystal skulls made in 1993, and said, "I would like Damien to acknowledge that 'John really did inspire the skull and influenced my work a lot.'"^[25]

those who applaud him:
"There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol."^[27] Despite Hirst's insults to him, Saatchi remains a staunch supporter, labelling Hirst a genius^[26] and stating:

“

General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.[28]

”

****I would quickly to take note that Saatchi left out Duchamp. Also, in my readings I have not come across Pollock as frequently as perhaps the general public would like****

Hirst's restaurant and pharmacy:

Hirst's best known restaurant involvement was Pharmacy, located in Notting Hill, London, which closed in September 2003. Although one of the owners, Hirst had only leased his art work to the restaurant, so he was able to retrieve and sell it at a Sotheby's auction, earning over £11 million. Some of the work had been adapted, e.g. by signing it prior to the auction.^[34].

Hirst opened and currently helps to run a seafood restaurant, 11 The Quay, in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in the UK.

Those who aren't fond of Hirst:
The Stuckist art group was founded in 1999 with a specific anti-Britart agenda by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish;^[31] Hirst is one of their main targets. They wrote (referring to a Channel 4 programme on Hirst):

“

The fact that Hirst's work does mirror society is not its strength but its weakness - and the reason it is guaranteed to decline artistically (and financially) as current social modes become outmoded. What Hirst has insightfully observed of his spin-paintings in Life and Death and Damien Hirst is the only comment that needs to be made of his entire oeuvre: "They're bright and they're zany - but there's fuck all there at the end of the day."[30]

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I just wanted to post these little tid bits to get me thinking, to make me feel obliged to respond to them.

A Quick Thought or two

Takashi Murakami appeals to the market in more than one way, something which gives him a greater amount of depth in my opinion (it is important to note here that regardless what I say about TM, I do think he is an artist and that he makes art--I see it as inevitable--but this does not mean that it makes sense on its own terms).

He not only appeals to consumers via his consumerist manner in which he makes art, but making an art corporation also appeals directly to collectors, who are frequently very wealthy business owners. The environment he created is not too unlike that which a collector might be used to. It may be more pluralist than I initially thought.

On an aside, I was going through Gardner's Art through the Ages. G:ATA is THE art history book for any class that is doing a survey class. This one was published in 1948, and the twentieth century section was vastly different than from what it is now. Seriously, I hadn't heard of 75 percent of the artists mentioned. This naturally raises questions about what is going on now; there might be an artistic revolution going on in the least likely place on the planet right now, that will only be recognized decades from today.

SuperFlat

Takashi Murakami is on a mission. His goal: blur the boundaries between high and low art; attack otaku culture, exposing it for the perversion it is; reestablish a sustainable post-war Japanese art market. His comments on the Japanese obsession over mass-produced anime, manga and lolicon imagery challenge the status quo. In our time, cheap products, new technology and dying ethics (not morals) are making the world more impersonal, real and fake every day. It would seem a great task to discover a Japanese art market, attack an overwhelmingly popular culture and confront the well-held tenets of visual arts. How did he address these difficult issues? He started Kaikai Kiki Co., LLC.

There is nothing wrong with factory-produced key-chains, plush toys, oversized sculptures or lousylumpy paintings. In fact, this is a reliable response to a consumerist, art-depraved Japanese public. It addresses the demands of this group without stretching their sense of art far. How could a firm better address an anime and manga-obsessed market? The business has an effective structure with a front-man, Murakami—CEO, president of operations and managing creative director—several lesser-known artists, Aya Takano, Chiho Aoshima, Chinatsu Ban, Mahomi Kunikata, Rei Satō, Akane Koide, and a willing force of nearly one hundred workers. Art sees more of this corporate-style governance than the community may be willing to recognize. These companies churn out much of the effective high-art and middle-art in our day. Profit-maximizing practices for the art community create more exposure, less work, and more product. Is not producing more what this is about? How can an artist reach a broad base without gathering an obsessed following? That is how manga and anime became popular.

These factories are exactly factories. Murakami is the head of the operation. Does that mean he designs “his” artwork? Maybe. Does that mean he has a part in any stage of production past initial blueprints? Emphatically no. He does not touch his artwork, mold it, paint it, or install it. In such a setting, how is the artwork “his” if he does not create it himself? That is the beauty of a factory. He is able to appeal to the consumerist public he faces while maintaining face. His “bending the rules,” down-with-consumerism persona construes something timeless, a worthy cause. In the same moment, his multi-national factories churns out vinyl figurines, posters and t-shirts, artworks, paintings and sculptures in an underground effort to push the same agenda. He utilizes the consumerist agenda to undermine it. Is it really possible to live by the sword and destroy it before it comes back around to kill you?

An art factory is impersonal. It is less personal than a Chinese factory producing toys for wall-marrt stores. This is because we see Kaikai Kiki Co., LLC and we think Takashi Murakami. Do we tie the late Sam Walton in with any of his stores? No. We know the products are produced by day-laborers in China. We believe that somehow Takashi Murakami is responsible for the artwork we see in galleries, installations and on the sidewalks as we stare up at 30-foot sculptures. Murakami’s obsession with beating down consumerism may have brought him to this consumerist approach. Art producer-art consumer, or art producer-gallery-art consumer. This was the market structure up until fifty years ago. The structure has many more buffers now. Will it be possible to reduce fetishism with such impersonal gestures? Hype may be that important. -Thomas

Good Art

The good-art is a fib. Chelsea means more and less each day. People take themselves very seriously. Very seriously. I take myself seriously, as I am sure others do also, but there's got to be some kind of humility somewhere. The idealisms of good or appropriate or fitting art are usually accompanied by so much pre-determined baggage, that the art isn't regarded so much as that which came before it. A purely empirical methodology of classification is unrelated, many say, incalculable. When several people are together and they talk of good art, they are talking of something before it, which didn't really come, because it wasn't like that when it was. Bach is unimaginably different to us now than it was to them before us. This is a contributing factor to the reason that Salieri was a noted musician in Mozart's time and Telemann was somehow considered an all-out genius when Bach was considered a light-weight, a lowly-one. Unfortunately, I think that often we disregard that which is and pretend to regard that which isn't. This all leads to a missing of what I (though I don't really exist) call real art. The point isn't recognition, no matter how much I may feel it is. Good (notice, no quotation-marks) art is epitomized by an appreciation for recognition while allowing for ultimate freedom in expression beyond that possibility of recognition and acceptance. -Thomas

End of the beginning.

Thomas and I, Walker, have started this collaborative blog so that we may communicate with each other via writing. It is a place to have our ideas put down, and to have these ideas responded to: a constant on-going conversation. The current topic we want to explore is artists and art corporations (artists that are a small hair away from just being a corporation, or ones that actually may be just that). I will organize my argument in the next week and post it here. Hopefully the conversation generated will eventually roll into a book covering a range of subjects. It is primarily an art historical and art criticism piece, focusing on the studio art market, general art theory, current studio art-making practices, and plagiarism of studio art works (at least as how I see it now. This being a collaboration means there's lots of room for change!). Just to make my terms clear... Art is used generally meaning specifically VISUAL ART and also THE ARTS (as in writing, music, film etc). I refuse to confuse these two as I think it shows a certain bias. Studio art is also different than visual art. Visual art is art that serves a visual purpose. Studio art is the practice of making work in a studio, which means the piece can be about sound or sight or taste, whatever. For example, Julianne Swartz makes some pieces using PVC pipes. They travel through the museum and there are small holes in the pipes or some such thing. From the holes we hear voices. Though this piece has a visual element, placing it in the category of "visual arts" would be misleading. I think to categorize it in "studio arts" makes more sense, seeing as how it depends on various senses. -Walker