Damien Hirst : Art and Celebrity excerpts (2003)
Now onto the king of art + celebrity from John A. Walker’s book.
Between 1988 and 1996, Damien Hirst (b.1965) became Britain’s most notorious artist, a figure comparable to the Americans Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. Articles about him appeared in tabloid newspapers and lifestyle magazines as well as the art press. In fact, his dealer Jay Jopling encouraged tabloid reporters to visit Hirst’s exhibitions thinking that any ridicule would be worth the publicity, which in turn would be more valuable than reviews by serious critics. Hirst was regarded as the leader of a new generation of British artists called “the YBAs” (young British artists) due to a series of shows mounted by Charles Saatchi in his own North London gallery. (Julian Stallabrass prefers the more sarcastic label “High Art Lite”.) Saatchi was Hirst’s main patron and ensured that his favourite received plenty of press coverage. Hirst also had a flair for self-promotion and marketing. Like his patron, he was an entrepreneur who curated mixed exhibitions with absurd titles and undertook a variety of business ventures.
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol into a poor, proletarian, Catholic family. He was illegitimate and never knew his real father. His mother used to draw and encouraged her son to follow suit. School friends associated his first name with the son of Satan in the horror film The Omen (1976) rather than with Saint Damien. An ebullient child and wild teenager, he enjoyed practical jokes. He grew up in the northern industrial city of Leeds where he studied at the Joseph Kramer School of Art and took a foundation course at Leeds School of Art (1985). A taste for the macabre was manifested early when, at the age of 16, he gained access to a hospital mortuary to draw corpses and had his portrait taken laughing next to a severed head. Like Francis Bacon, an artist he admired, he was fascinated by the images in the pathology textbooks he stole because they combined horror and beauty. Medicines in the form of pills were later to preoccupy him and he constructed a number of cabinets in which bottles of pills, laboratory specimens and surgical instruments were displayed.
Damien Hirst was one of the art stars to emerge from the fine art course at Goldsmiths College in South London, which he attended between 1986 and 1989. Conceptual art was a pervasive influence and so it was the artist’s ideas that counted most: any medium could be used and the task of making the art works was a secondary matter that could be delegated to assistants once finances permitted. It was due to tutors such as Richard Wentworth, Jon Thompson and Michael Craig-Martin that students came to regard themselves as professional artists and to focus on cracking the commercial gallery system. To promote himself and his friends, Hirst organised a now legendary student show called Freeze (1988) in an old building in Docklands and made sure it was seen by influential curators and collectors. He raised sponsorship money and published a good-quality catalogue, which he circulated to London’s art dealers.
What really made Damien Hirst famous far beyond the art world were shock-horror sculptural installations using dead animals— cows, lambs, fish and sharks—presented whole or sliced into parts, preserved in formaldehyde in large vitrines. (The animals were "presented", not "re-presented"; hence, no modelling skills were required. Hirst’s aim was to introduce reality into art directly, not to depict it.) As Hirst pointed out, humans have often killed animals in order to look at them (but was this any reason to continue the practice?). These works resembled exhibits found in natural history museums and were easy to understand and so became popular but they also attracted vandals, cartoonists, and parodic advertisements and angry protests by animal rights activists. Some of the latter were arrested and fined by the courts. (See Damien Hirst 1994: Lamb vandalized
for an example.) Damien Hirst’s obsession with animals and death was certainly appropriate to Britain in the late twentieth century given that fox hunting was a contentious issue and the nation’s livestock experienced serious diseases, such as foot and mouth, which necessitated wholesale slaughter.
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