a speech for a 12 year old and a 13 year old: A Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots; SPOTS SPINS AND SPARKLES: IS IT ART?

A Leopard Can’t Change Its Spots

When you look at a piece of art what thoughts pass through your mind? One of the first things I think of is what went into making it and how long did it take. Art is an amazing process: besides the making, why? When I look at Damien Hirst art I think the opposite: what little thought, effort, content, and the why usually has to do with making money. Besides isn’t it cheating if someone does the struggling and another claims the credit? The question of the validity of Damien Hirst’s art is the topic of my speech today.

The Spot Paintings

Rumors say there are over 2,500 paintings by Hirst with multi-colored spots painted on them. They are supposed to have something to do with pills and medications but I see an excuse to make tons of the same, unimaginative paintings—millions of spots costing millions of pounds. The canvases are in every size, shape and color not to mention the prints on paper which number in the tens of thousands. Was it such a good idea to begin with? Does it warrant endless replication like hydras? Are these paintings, or a recipe for printing money without getting arrested? I think they are no more than wallpaper (which he has made too of course).

The Spin Paintings

Not even painted really, the spin paintings by Damien Hirst are made by pouring paint into machines that splatter over rotating canvases; all in the name of art, or spitting out product, literally. And yet again, the output of these so-called paintings is measured in the thousands. I used to believe art was unique. These contraptions and formulas are just that: art by design, by strategy, not about creativity and inspiration.

The Diamond Skull

Damien Hirst made a sculpture with diamonds, the cost of which was announced far and wide. Well, for one thing he didn’t make it and on top of spending millions for 8,000 diamonds to glue onto a platinum skull, he had to pay the people to do the gluing. A Van Gogh cost £3.75 for materials and is priceless; Hirst rendered £8m worthless. So they wouldn’t be embarrassed, the gallery announced the skull was sold for $100 million dollars to a group including Damien Hirst himself, his dealer and possibly a collector. In other words, after a worldwide media blitz no one was convinced the skull was art, nor I.

The Shops

Damien Hirst opened two retail shops in London alone and another in New York in partnership with his art dealer. How can one person generate so much stuff to fill galleries, museums and stores all over the world all the time? The answer is they can’t. What suffers is the content or should I say the lack of content. In the end, is this art or just another form of trading football cards?

The Market Judges

In the past months alone there were at least six new Damien Hirst shows including three in London, and shows in New York, Zurich and Mexico City. Can any artist produce so much without affecting quality? From a public auction record of nearly $20,000,000 in 2007 many works have since gone unsold. The art of Damien Hirst seems more about gambling on ever increasing prices then about appreciation. Big business wins out over artistic expression.

Handmade

Damien Hirst has now switched to crude paintings said to be made by the artist himself. Funny that its news when an artist decides to make his own art. In order to fulfill all his commitments, Damien Hirst is flooding the market again but this time with art he makes himself. Can you really learn a new craft from scratch in your mid 40s and expect instant mastery? From the looks of the last exhibits, the answer is no. It goes to prove you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

SPOTS SPINS AND SPARKLES: IS IT ART?

The spot paintings of Damien Hirst may all look the same, like wallpaper or candy wrappers but if you look closely they are each somehow different. What I like most about these paintings is that when you look at them, no matter your mood or the weather, they make you happy. They are cheerful, colorful and make you think of birthdays, parties and good things. Funny enough though, they relate to the colors of medications we take when we are ill. But when I learned of this it made me think that these works that look like fun are really about how pills help us when we are sick—about how through science we live longer lives!


When I was a kid in New York they had a toy called Spirograph where you used these little plastic devices and pens to make perfect symmetrical drawings that made me feel like I was a better artist that I probably was. As a young child I felt a great power at being able to make what looked like professional drawings from a few plastic contraptions that made me feel I had skills beyond my imagination. Damien Hirst has created a giant scaled toy to make paintings that look like they were made by a curious child rather than a professional artist. These paintings spring from a machine created by the artist where paint is poured through and lands on a spinning canvas to make a psychedelic splatter sometimes with the images of skulls lurking underneath. It seems simple or almost like there is no art in the art! But when you look at the result it looks like something I’d really like to have on my wall and that is probably as good as any proof of good art!


For millions of dollars Damien Hirst bought like 8,000 diamonds and glued them to a skull cast out of platinum, a material that is more valuable than gold. Never in the history of art has anyone made a sculpture where the materials cost as much as an office building. When you think of art you think of canvas and paint, like a Van Gogh painting which probably cost as much as £3.70 to actually make. But Van Gogh would probably be a different artist if he knew about Lady Gaga, Madonna, and football players like Beckham who signed a contract to play in the USA for something like $250,000,000. The glittering diamond skull of Damien Hirst was something like if we held up a giant mirror to our society and took a close look at each other and ourselves. What we would see was a group of people obsessed by money, shopping, glamour and possessions. So how can anyone criticize something that only was a reflection of who we were? In the end, contemporary art is nothing but a way to look at our likes, dislikes, our passions and our dreams for the future. 

Yes, its art and more than that it’s us!

THE CULTURE SHOW, BBC 2, Upcoming Film on Michael Landy

Garbage God

A large part of Michael Landy’s career is about garbage, which is rather interesting as our lives are consumed with so much of it on a daily basis. in addition to installations Landy makes phenomenal black and white drawings that are exquisite in their detail, with subtlety absent in other works. In New York the sanitation department had a resident artist who largely worked in a garbage dump, perhaps that’s something for Landy and London to look into.

In earlier work, Landy picked up garbage off the street (for Scrapheap) then threw all is own stuff away (Break Down), now he wants to dispose of your stuff. Not just any stuff but your art. And not just any of your art, but the art he deems acceptable for the giant Perspex vitrine that he is presently having fabricated for his upcoming exhibit at South London Gallery called Art Bin. It’s a goldfish bowl of junk. He calls it a “monument to creative failure”. I say the whole thing sounds like someone else’s work.

No doubt Damien Hirst’s fabricator, who built an incinerator featured in Landy’s Scrapheap installation (this was proudly alluded to in a Tate Modern release), will also have a hand in the ambitious clear garbage pail being built for this project. But I guess the fabricator has nothing but time now that his biggest client has gone painting. in Art Bin, Landy is using our art as stand-ins for spot painting studio assistants.

Rather than the notion of creative destruction, which seemed prominent in Break Down, where Landy destroyed his personal belongings to make art (and a point?), here we have destructive creation, where he makes art but only at the expense of art by others. Landy’s destruction of other’s labors in the creation of a media spectacle and readymade artwork seem a bit gratuitous. When US artist Beth Haggart destroyed all her belongings in 1995 prior to Landy’s installation, she just did it without a fanfare and then joined the Peace Corps.

There’s a fine line between success and failure, as you can see everywhere around you. But art is a slow burning process, and what looks like crap today, can be tomorrow’s gold spun from hay. I'm sure there are more than a few of my own things that are ready for the trash heap, things I’ve collected and even made, but I’d rather save that job for posterity, or for my kids when I croak.

Then there is the page full of legal disclaimers on the official web site to sign up for the right to throw your own art away. “Michael Landy or his representative will decide which works go into Art Bin.” I wonder what special training it entails to be his representative, to make such discernments. Sounds like getting into Studio 54 in 1978.

Apparently there is some unspoken, very subjective hierarchy of aesthetics involved in this monumental creative failure. Which is an apt name. Or was it monument to creative failure? If he doesn’t choose you does that mean you didn’t make the grade because your art was too good? Is it a success to fail to be chosen? Or if you are chosen does that mean you really suck as an artist; so though you made it to the South London Gallery, isn’t it really under false pretenses? Michael Landy has gone from the Picasso of trash to the God of garbage. It’s the ego as expressed through castoffs, first it was street trash, and then his own, now yours.

“Art Bin exists to promote art and not to denigrate it.” Promote whose art? Certainly not the artists suitably awful enough to have their art accepted in the dump. “It is in no way the intention of Michael Landy to comment on the quality of any work placed and/or disposed of in Art Bin.” But he said it was a monument to failure. Is that not a qualitative comment?

“I forego my moral rights to my work” by agreeing to have it considered for Art Bin. Can you do that by agreeing to bury your art in someone else’s artwork? Can you divorce yourself from your own moral rights to something? It’s a shame to think moral rights don’t transcend art like a soul from a body. In the end the art will be worm ridden amongst empty beer and tuna cans, a fate not suffered by the art alone.

In Scrapheap, Michael Landy picked up garbage off the street, fashioned it into dolls and incinerated it. Then he systematically threw away all of his own possessions in the name of art. Now he’s throwing away your stuff. What’s next? Is he going to clean out Tate Britain of art he feels superfluous or that takes up too much space? Or will he permanently move into a garbage can like Seseme Street’s Oscar the Grouch, who put it so concisely in his theme song: “I Love Trash”:

“Anything dirty or dingy or dusty
Anything ragged or rotten or rusty
I love trash.”

First Day of Trading 20-10

Back to School

On the first trading day of 2010, oil topped $80 and gold gained $25 to $1121.50; what is art but another asset class in today’s commodities driven economy. Manufacturing is expanding and money is sticking to art like glue. Look for it to continue to do so but only for acknowledged quality works. There should be gradually expanding auction results in contemporary and design and in the impressionist and modern markets there will be a plethora of records. Galleries will experience similar moderately rising results. Re: prices of art, there has been a firming up since June 09, and the formerly wide-open discount window is slowly closing. China, India, Russia and the Middle East will see continued strength in artistic output and performance in the market, though off recent stratospheric levels; American and European art will continue to flourish as well. Even in light of diminished values and volumes of art sales in the recent past, there has still been a monumental expansion of the art-aware universe, and the base of buyers continues to grow. Once art came off the cave walls it’s been coveted—and like morphine, when hooked, at the least only a steady fix will do. After much searching, I was able to locate two quasi -rare 1970’s classic cars in excellent condition that were specifically expressed as being for sale. Between December and January, not one but both sellers reneged on agreed upon deals when I matched, then exceeded the asking prices. What was frequently the case the past two years was the opposite—jittery buyers pulling out of deals after a meeting of the minds. Then, the same thing happened with three 8-figure impressionist paintings. If this isn't a good omen for the economy I don't know what is, or is it a changing of the guard from a period where financial institutions and instruments were equally trusted. Now only the things themselves will do, art, property and the raw materials that will fuel future growth. It’s also rather frustrating when you were hoping to drive a couple of those things into the coming year.