Discuss the development of the career of Damien Hirst

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Francesca Lewis VIIIJM

Discuss the development of the career of Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is one of Britain’s most controversial artists. Since the very beginning of his career, when he curated his own work in the ‘Freeze’ show as an art student, some have found his work exciting and new, whereas others have lampooned it for being boring and over-hyped. Certainly, like many other artists of the YBA generation, Hirst’s work has developed in new and shocking ways, commenting on the world around him and making full use of the patronage of Charles Saatchi and an ever-growing demand for his work in the marketplace. There are three main features of the development of Hirst’s career – his work, his contribution the art market, and the criticism that his work has received in recent years. However, it is quite clear that even failures and criticism won’t stand in the way of his ambition, which can be seen from Michael Craig-Martin’s comment that “Damien wants to be king of the world”.

There is no one medium that Hirst uses above all others – from painting to dead creatures preserved in formaldehyde, his work takes many shapes and forms. Some of his greatest commercial works are his ‘spin-paintings’ such as Beautiful, Kiss my fxxxing ass in which one of his assistants pours paint onto a revolving canvas to create the strange, swirling brightly coloured effect. These paintings, he claims, were inspired by the children’s programme Blue Peter and reflect the bright, do-it-yourself message of the program. Hirst’s point is that the ‘spin-paintings’ impart the same message to all who see them. Critics, however, take a different view of these works, which they claim are used to inflate the prices of his work on the market, and will lead to a price bubble. The paintings are made in just eight minutes, and often by one of Hirst’s assistants and yet they sell for tens of thousands of pounds. As his dealer and owner of the White Cube gallery, Jay Jopling, commented, “Lots of people want to own a piece of Damien Hirst, and he can offer them an original work of art”.

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Even then, it is important to note that ‘spin-paintings’ are by far the least provocative of Hirst’s oeuvre. When he was nominated, and won, the Turner Prize in 1995 for his exhibition Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away, the reaction of the press and several art critics was enormous. The exhibition featured one of his most famous works, Mother and Child Divided, which showed a sheep and a lamb pickled in tanks of formaldehyde. Hirst defends his formaldehyde work by claiming that they are a very real commentary on the world, of dead things preserved and the awful reality ...

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