Some guys writing about Damien Hirst gets it right below. The attempt to collapse all cultural meaning into mere simulacra was the excuse behind the greed of 80’s Art market, that we now accept without question. Art no longer has any purpose beyond its promotion in the service of cash. Its just another niche market in the entertainment industry. Its legion of dependants, satraps, servile sycophants, art critics, in collusion, in thrall to a deadening orthodoxy. These critics who make vacuous pronouncements, mouths half open as they stare vacantly into the middle distance in a vain hope to find meaning in their own mediocrity and the mediocrity in artists like Damien Hirst. Hirst was promoted by his pimp Jay Jopling, in collusion with third rate cultural commentators masquerading as art critics. Jopling, stockbroker, dilettante, a man of wealth and banal taste and Hirst one of Joplings old 80s whores, and like Jopling/art critics - Hirst is the Homer Simpson that got lucky, surviving into the 21st Century, dragging intellectual artistic civilisation back to a hoary, discredited, post modern stone age. Contemplation and meaning are just empty words, lost in a void where the function of Hirsts art becomes an altarpiece to the reverence and glory of naked commercialism. We push, we shove, we get hot, we overhear the inane babble that passes for insight and erudition and try and resist the urge to reach out and slap the perpetrator. We trip over each others cultural values, fellow culture vultures scrabbling to catch a glimpse of the object of our desire. In that moment, the insight/transcendence we hoped art could bring is made real in its hollowness. Then we head for the bar, aesthetic foreplay unconsummated. Hirst is just the houseboy for the neo liberal art market, applauded on the sidelines by those who should be reviewing Disney World, rather than writing about art; who express faux outrage, or maybe its delight, that much contemporary art to paraphrase Brecht , is the continuation of business by other means.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 22:51:48 +0000