Damien Hirst : Art in the age of mass media
Excerpts from John A. Walker’s book (2001).
In the welter of media coverage, the artistic merit of the sculpture— arguably a dismal work— was virtually ignored. As the careers of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys and Jeff Koons indicate, the artist as media celebrity and master of publicity is not new but Hirst has certainly played the game as effectively as his forebears. At the same time, Damien Hirst is on a treadmill that may ultimately ruin him: fashion is fickle and the public may soon become weary of hearing about him. Hirst has admitted in interviews that he fears becoming the media image of himself and that he has to constantly reinvent himself to retain the interest of journalists and photographers.
Damien Hirst and the yBas
Damien Hirst has been cited here as just one example of the media-savvy generation called "yBas" (young British artists). Tracey Emin, an artist specializing in personal confessions, is another member of this generation who could also have been discussed. The critic Julian Stallabrass prefers to describe the work of the yBas as "high art lite" and, in a perceptive analysis, has remarked:
"artists were for a time forced to look for new markets … Many of them did so by appealing to the mass media, and their art became a mirror of the mass media’s concerns. Yet, to say that art has become more like advertising, or more like the press, is only a fragment of the truth. Rather, art has become more like business, at the same time as business has become more like art. This convergence is the secret of contemporary art’s limited popular success."
Later he reflected on the implications for art criticism:
As art and business draw closer together, it becomes increasingly difficult to criticise art because that amounts to criticising business. The trend in British high art lite to use material from mass culture, to present it but not to comment on it, to be neither affirming nor condemning, is a precise reflection of the place in which art criticism finds itself. To praise or criticise seems, on the face of it, to be as pointless as judging the weather … yet to make no judgment is to accept complicity with a system of things which only appears natural, or at least to play down the conflict and contradiction in a structure seen as unitary and functional.[2]
(Excerpt: Pages 164-66, 3rd edition.)
Footnote:
[2] Julian Stallabrass. (1999). High Art Lite. (London: Verso), pp. 265 & 271.
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