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May 16, 2009
The Age of Disillusionment
We’ve had the Renaissance, we’ve had the Enlightenment, now we’re in the Disillusionment, or, as it might become known: The Great Disillusionment.
Ok, so maybe it’s just me. But, Damn! There’s some tricky stuff out there. If it’s not Damien spinning paint on an old turntable [just like Tony Hart taught us, all those years ago] it’s Jake and Dinos disfiguring Airfix soldiers.
Damien Hirst, Beautiful, Cyclonic, Bleeding, Slashing, Hurricane, Dippy, Cowards Painting” 1992, household paint on canvas
Even Uncle Lucian, the last remaining bastion of oil paint, does awkward, yet “sensational”, portraits of Kate Moss, which ring the cash till up into the umptymillions.
Lucian Freud, Naked Portrait, 2002, oil on canvas
Kate Moss
We’ve known for a while that art is Big Business – living artists selling work for sums previously reserved for dead artists. But it’s what constitutes art that’s worrying.
Work No.88, Martin Creed, paper
Work No.88 is a scrunched-up piece of paper. This belongs to the Youcoulddothattoobutyoudidn’t School of Art.
Now everyone is completing to find the most mind numbing, fatuous gesture to which they can attach the greatest significance. Today it’s not about skill it’s about coming up with a one-liner and extending it way beyond it’s breaking point.
Art like never before is wide open – anything goes. It’s not about whether you express an emotion in a way that communicates that feeling, it’s about whether you can do something mildly shocking and get away with it.
Damien Hirst, painter unknown, 2005
A few years ago Damien Hirst exhibited figurative oil paintings. They were graphic depictions taken from photographs of his wife giving birth to their son, but he didn’t paint them – his assistants did.
Woody Allen once said that 90% of being a film star is just turning up. In art it seems, you don’t even have to turn up.
Posted by john at May 16, 2009 09:49 AM
Comments
Does this work for writing too? I didn't write the Da Vinci Code but if I said it was in the Daphne School of Writing then could I have the money? That Hirst lad is on to something here and what it is is Money. Perhaps I should have listened more closely to his teenage ramblings when he was in my brother's class at school.
Posted by: Daphne at May 17, 2009 11:49 PM