"As for visual arts, the current Damien Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern is a perfect opportunity to see what becomes of an artificer whose impulse towards difficult subject matter was unsupported by any capacity for hard cogitation or challenging artistry. The early works - the stuffed animals and fly-bedizened carcasses - retain a certain - albeit recherché - shock value, while the subsequent ones degenerate steadily to the condition of knocked-off merchandise, making the barrier between the gift shop and the exhibition space evaporate in a puff of consumerism."
Will Self sounds off about Damien Hirst in a piece on the value of using obscure words and the anti-intellectual trend in the arts.
Also on the subject of language is this article about the term "Luddite". I consider myself ticked off for misusing it - from now on I'll be describing myself as a technophobe instead.
Meanwhile, it's good to see that The Thick Of It is exerting a linguistic influence over politics, with Malcolm Tucker's term "omnishambles" recently used during Prime Minister's Questions by Labour leader Ed Miliband.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
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Went this weekend to the Tate Modern. As part of the exhibition watched an hour long doc on Hirst talking about his life as an artist and in particular the thinking behind his series of works and individual pieces. Two things stuck me. Hirst speaks earnestly and genuinely about art and his works. he really believes in what he's doing, without the pretension I'd been led to believe. Second, very little of what he says makes any sense. There’s a lot of excitement but it’s backed up with empty rhetoric. He talks at length about how he wants to make art that you don’t have to think about – it’s just a visceral reaction, but then about the value of conceptual art and how the meaning forms in the mind of the viewer. More than this, much of his reasoning for different pieces (the giant anatomical figure, his coloured dots series) comes down to little more than “well this is what I wanted to do and I thought it would be great”.
As such Will self makes a good point about Hirst’s lack of appetite for intellectual engagement. Hirst seems happy to make conceptual art without the concepts. As such, I found much of it to be shit.
Say what you really think, Jon!
I went to see the Turner Prize exhibition at the Baltic in Newcastle at Christmas and was dumbfounded to hear one of the nominees say she doesn't really know what her work means. Fair enough, let the viewer make up his or her own mind/interpretation rather than claiming the artist is always or even sometimes the ultimate arbiter of their work's meaning - but surely the artist has to have some kind of concept or intention to start with (or at least to discover the concept during the creative process)? This seems to be what you're saying about Hirst: 'Doing this is pretty cool, and so I've done it, and that's all there is to it.' As a result, while visually striking, his art is also a bit gimmicky and vacuous.
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