The Emporor loses his new clothes

[dieseltaylor]

Finally one of the glitterrati/arty set speaks out [and confirms what mere mortals have suspected]:

This April will see the first major UK retrospective of Damien Hirst's work at London's Tate Modern, but an expert has branded his contemporary conceptual art "seriously worthless" and says that it has no place in top galleries.

Writing in The Independent, art critic Julian Spalding said that Hirst's works "have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art".

"His work isn't worth a cent, not because it isn't great art, good art or even bad art, but because it isn't art at all," he said.

"Hirst should not be in the Tate. He's not an artist. What separates Michelangelo from Hirst is that Michelangelo was an artist and Hirst isn't."

Spalding predicts that when collectors realise how "worthless" conceptual art is that the market will crash.

Hirst is one of Britain's richest men. His 1992 pickled shark installation, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, was commissioned by Charles Saatchi for £50,000, and sold in 2005 for £6-7million. In 2007, For the Love of God - a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds - sold for £50million. And in 2008, Hirst auctioned 223 items of work for £111million, a world record.

[Thomm]

Of course it is an art to get somebody to pay that much money for, e.g., a dead fish.

For this achievement, the world will remember Hirst far longer than, e.g., Julian Spalding.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Other Means]

Good .

[Michael Emrys]

One would not be too far wrong to say that most Post-Modern "art" really isn't art at all, but a scam foisted on a public unwilling to admit it's been had all along. I suppose one could also join Thomm in grudging respect of the bunko "artists" who've been running the scams, but frankly I have neither the time or the stomach for it.

Michael

[Affentitten]

But hardly a new opinion. Indeed it just plays into the whole "art should be controversial" argument.

[JonS]

I'm not a fan of surrealism. Not at all.

But I'd probably still balk at calling it 'not art'

[Pak_43]

Surely all art is subjective? Isn't that the point of it?

[Thomm]

Some source material:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/julian-spalding-damien-hirsts-are-the-subprime-of-the-art-world-7586386.html

Best regards,

Thomm

[hoolaman]

Some of his stuff is quite good, some is stupid.

He has proper paintings and sculptures, which would surely be art by any measure.

Then he has a shelf with bottles on it.

[Michael Emrys]

Surely all art is subjective? Isn't that the point of it?

That's only a part of the equation. If it were all, then the whole subject would cease to be interesting. What make it interesting is to set rules that partially objectify the subject and then see what you can do within those rules. That's what makes so much Renaissance art so powerful. They had just defined the rules of perspective, for instance, and playing around with them managed to turn out some great art.

To look at it from another angle, when anything is art, then nothing is.

Michael

[Pak_43]

What make it interesting is to set rules that partially objectify the subject and then see what you can do within those rules

Who sets those rules? The artist? The critics? The buyer? Society in general?

To look at it from another angle, when anything is art, then nothing is.

But surely what art is, is different things to different people? I'm not sure Tracy Emin's work speaks to me on any level as "art" but to plenty of people it appears to, ditto Hockney's work while he was in America which my girlfriend really likes and to me looks like painting by numbers...

In fact I'm pretty sure I don't have a definition of what "art" I like and that which I don't, I just have "things I like" and "things I don't" without really worrying if it's "art" or not. I quite like Damien Hirsts shark in a tank, in the sense I look at it and think how powerful a beast the shark is and wonder how on earth he pulled it off on a technical level. I really don't stop and consider "is it art?" and I'm pretty sure Hirst is trying to make a statement about something, although what that would be I don't know....

I guess I'm trying to say is that I think artists should be able to do whatever they want without having some judgement about whether it has "artistic merit" or not. Let the purchaser / viewer decide that?

[dieseltaylor]

I guess I'm trying to say is that I think artists should be able to do whatever they want without having some judgement about whether it has "artistic merit" or not. Let the purchaser / viewer decide that?

I applaud the sentiment. But what sticks in my gullet is the art establishment telling me what is art and I am the buffoon if I disagree. I like Jack Vettriano but I am not an expert so whats my opinion against these:

According to The Daily Telegraph he has been described as the Jeffrey Archer of the art world, a purveyor of "badly conceived soft porn", [4] Sandy Moffat, head of drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art, said: "He can’t paint, he just colours in."[5] Richard Calvocoressi, when director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: "I’d be more than happy to say that we think him an indifferent painter and that he is very low down our list of priorities (whether or not we can afford his work, which at the moment we obviously can’t). His ‘popularity’ rests on cheap commercial reproductions of his paintings."[6] In The Scotsman George Kerevan wrote "He suffers all the same criticisms of the early French Impressionists: mere wallpaper, too simplistic in execution and subject, too obviously erotic."[7] Alice Jones wrote in The Independent that Vettriano has been labelled a chauvinist whose "women are sexual objects, frequently half naked and vulnerable, always in stockings and stilettoes."[8]

For those curious:

http://www.redraggallery.co.uk/print-jack-vettriano.asp

If you view the establishment and art galleries as a self-serving industry with the morals of a snake-oil salesman I think we can understand that marketability and profit are hugely important.

I am fond of some of the Impressionists but some were rubbish at doing figures on their landscapes, and every artist has their poorer paintings however the aura of "great" carries weight and are assumed to be masterpieces. Just bear in mind the Rembrandt effect on the average human brain and the loss of critical faculties.

[Pak_43]

But what sticks in my gullet is the art establishment telling me what is art and I am the buffoon if I disagree

Why do you even care what they think? They're not stopping you going and seeing this stuff are they? It's all subjective (imho) anyway so big deal what they write?