4/23/09
By Harvey Blume
Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme have become symbols of
fraud, greed and dull-witted naiveté, of lax oversight, slobbering credulity,
and rank criminality — the whole slew of failings and circumstances that have
beggared Wall St. and deflated the global economy. Damien Hirst is less known.
He’s no billionaire swindler, merely a millionaire artist.
However, it may be the time has come to talk about art a la Hirst in the same
way we discuss finance a la Madoff.
Hirst has always been interested in rot and decay and
perhaps also, however faintly, in the suggestion of rebirth. He’s displayed
rotting beef carcasses, for example, that host maggots — lowly rebirths — which
emerge only to end their lives on fly paper. He’s shown sharks submerged in
formaldehyde, which slows and thereby highlights their decomposition. One such
shark, currently on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, looks deader,
sadder and less intact with each viewing.
Hirst’s best-known work is his diamond skull, consisting of
$23.6 million in precious stones embedded in much less costly human bone. Part
of the thing’s undeniable allure is, in fact, its sheer expense, carried over
into it being reportedly sold for $100 million.
The diamond skull was the most expensive, and the most
instantly profitable, new art work ever mounted. It glittered with questions
about dollars, art and death: Where did the skull come from? Were the stones
the blood diamonds of Africa’s civil wars? Was Hirst out to make art or a
fantastic fortune, and when exactly had the distinction between the two melted
away? Hirst posed asked the kinds of questions Warhol did, about art and
marketing for example, but raised to higher — real estate bubble — power.
Lately, Hirst has made it clear that he personally is on the
side of greed, proprietary control and art-as-lucre. In a story that has
received its fair share of attention in England, but hardly any here — well, we
do have Madoff — Hirst has delivered legal ultimatums to a sixteen year-old
east London street artist known as Cartrain, who dared incorporate images of
the decadent diamond skull into some of his designs. Hirst’s lawyers descended
on the scared kid and in effect told him: Don’t even think about it. Faced with
full Hirst force, Cartrain promised he’d stop, he’d never do it again, and as
proof of good faith turned over the £200 he had made on the operation to
Hirst’s minions, who did not refuse it.
But the world has changed dramatically since the day when a
diamond skull could epitomize art’s ambiguous ambitions. “The Economist,” for
example, that eminently centrist, sensible magazine, is currently using an
image of the skull to promote a reader debate on the subject of “Resenting
the Rich.” Will Damien Hirst sue “The Economist” for appropriating
the skull? If so, will “The Economist”, a la Cartrain, surrender all proceeds?
Self-effacing Cartrain, as it happens, has become a flag
around which a crew of English artists and musicians, all of whom proudly
resent the rich and especially rich artists, have rallied. Members of one
group, Red Rag To A Bull, have
dared Hirst to sue them for adopting the diamond skull to their own heartily
anti-copyright designs. The group has boasted that once they’ve made ” FIFTY
MILLION POUNDS” on pieces using the repurposed skull, they would “repay the
Street Urchin his 200 quid, help other Street Urchins and also feed starving
children in Africa and Sussex.”
No word from Hirst, who unlike Madoff, has not yet pled
guilty.
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