Damien Hirst 1994: Lamb vandalized
Now onto a classic hit from shock rock, we mean shock art. Excerpts from John A. Walker’s Art and outrage (1999).
In May 1994 in the Serpentine Gallery a vandal poured black ink into a glass tank “sculpture” by Damien Hirst, thus transforming the dead, white lamb inside into a black one. The vandal was charged with criminal damage but at his trial he pleaded artistic justification.
Damien Hirst is one of the most celebrated, notorious and sought-after British artists of the 1990s. His work sells for high prices to rich collectors but he is also known to many outside the art world. Hirst was born in Bristol into a working-class family in 1965 but grew up in Leeds where he attended the Joseph Kramer School of Art. Then, from 1985 to 1989, he studied fine art at Goldsmiths College, London, and showed his aptitude for self-promotion by organising a now famous exhibition called Freeze (1988) of his own and his contemporaries’ work in a derelict building in London’s Docklands. To ensure curators and dealers saw the show, Hirst arranged transportation for them.
Like Andy Warhol before him, Hirst is an extremely versatile artist who is willing to try his hand at any medium: he has produced abstract paintings, sculptural-type installations involving live and dead animals, medicine cabinets full of bottled specimens and surgical instruments, a commercial for cable television, a billboard image, a trailer for an opera which involved live rats, record cover designs, a Pop music video for the band Blur (featuring live sheep and pigs), and a gloomy, narrative film entitled Hanging Around (1996). His art world reputation was sealed in 1995 when he was awarded the Turner Prize, worth £20,000.
Journalists adore Damien Hirst because he makes such good copy: the amount of press and other media coverage he has generated in such a short career is astonishing. In 1994 Omnibus, BBC1’s flagship arts television strand, devoted a whole programme to him as if he were already an old master. (As the credits rolled Hirst exposed himself to the camera.) Janet Street Porter has claimed that Hirst is “a pop star and that’s what annoys the dreary art establishment”. But how can such a successful artist be said to “annoy” the art establishment when some who constitute that establishment have welcomed him with open arms?
Damien Hirst’s paintings are of three types:
1. randomly coloured discs arranged in vertical/horizontal rows like a decorator’s paint chart. These so-called “spot” or “dot” paintings are utterly vacuous—they make no claims to spirituality— and are travesties of abstract art. Their patterns have even been reproduced on dress fabrics by the fashion designer Rifat Ozbek. One critic has described them as “trademark” paintings because they are churned out by assistants to meet the demand of collectors (in 1996 one fetched £32,000 at auction). Hirst himself admits they are “dumb pictures about the dumbness of painting”;
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