...to start doing fine art! maybe this was posted here before. freaking amazing.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/popup?id=3234825

I have a ton of stuff signed by this dude. :P

I find the thing with fine art now is all about "idea" or bullshitting.

Oh yes, if you can reasonably justify your art, you can go far.

I'd rather be a sellout, though. (Well, as long as I'm not forking over my soul to people.)

...Would be kind of nice to have my very own unicorn in glass, though.

It's not even about bullshit...
We have a celeb culture, dicks like Hurst are top of the "fine art" celeb tree. How does a fool like him get there? Luck, networking, his name just building on itself- and all the morons see the name and follow his output.

Hurst is the Paris Hilton of the art world, nothing more. And just like you'd find it very hard to work your way into a Paris Hilton life situation, you'd find it very hard to get where Hurst is.

Hopefully, with the dowturn in the markets, he'll see his money dry up, but I wouldn't bet on it. The thing is, in business you create artificial worth for worthless things, fine art is just a part of that, except unlike sub-prime mortgages and loans or tech-stocks, you can't expose or torpedo fine art that easily. His work will likely stay at these inflated costs, because it's in the interests of the buyers that their investments retain their value. The only thing that could probably easily sink them is if Hurst's reputation was attacked: if people found out he was a paedophile or something. lol!

...Here's hoping :(

Ozoneocean
:gem:

Heavens, that's a fair amount of vitriol your boiling up and pouring over Damien's head! Nothing new in an anti fine art rant I suppose and you may be right, but I'd be interested to know where you draw the line?

Is conceptual art the villain? Is Warhol a waste of space or Duchamp a doofus? Any merit in a load of Pollocks? At what point did 'serious' art lose it's way? Does this question belong upstairs?

It's not an anti fine art rant; it's an anti celeb/big business fine art post. ;)

I studied the stuff for almost a decade, I go to shows, openings, have many friends who're now lecturers teaching it at universities, and well as many artist friends. :)

But there are different worlds. It's like music- in some cases you have musicians creating amazing stuff and entertaining. At another extreme you have Madonna and Brittany Spears making hundreds of millions. If you don't like Madonna or Brittany that doesn't mean you're anti music. And they didn't get where THEY are and make that sort of money because of their music either.

Do you see my point?
----------------------------

Just another aspect of the celeb culture, driven and supported by big business.

auction

Hirst's "The Abyss," featuring a number of stamped out cigarette butts, sold Monday at the British artist's sale at Sotheby's, London, for just under its top presale estimate of $3.2 million.

Someone paid 3.2 mil for a bunch of stamped out fags, the mans a bloody genius by god.

Every year at MIAD where I go to school, several freshman do projects with stomped out cigs from the student unions outdoor ashtrays and they smell godawful. Like what happens if you were to rub a wet dog all over the most fouls smelling tobacco you could find. It must take some serious reputation to be able to sell something that rank for 3.2 million.

And now that I've flipped through those more slowly, with the exception of the Angel, platinum/diamond skull and silver statue, they're more like science displays that got screwed up than art. Most of the pieces seem to consist of dunking a farm animal into formaldehyde and giving it a name.

Whaaaat? I don't get all the hate. Some of those pieces creep me the hell out. Yet at the same time, I think they're beautiful. For me, that's enough to make them good.

...definitely wouldn't pay several million dollars for any of it though. except the unicorn. That thing is awesome.

Koshou
I don't get all the hate.

Artistic ego envy, only the people who try to actually make money with art get it. It creates a bile that fouls their language everytime someone mentions an artist who will make more money in one auction then they will in their entire lives. lol!

Skullbie

Koshou
I don't get all the hate.

Artistic ego envy, only the people who try to actually make money with art get it. It creates a bile that fouls their language everytime someone mentions an artist who will make more money in one auction then they will in their entire lives. lol!

It's not that at all Skull. You obviously don't know much about "art" at the level...
and Koshou, whether the work speaks to you or not is irrelevant in terms of the cost here.

The point is that this is a severe example of artist as celebrity.

Hurt's work, artistically speaking, is the kind of thing (as Iba says), routinely produced by your art students and recent graduates. That's all. It has that level of thought and philosophy behind it. His work is charming, banal, naive, occasionally amusing, often crass and a little obvious. If it speaks to you that's fantastic. Go to a few art shows and small galleries around the place, especially graduate exhibitions and you can pick up a lot of work like that for less that $1000. :)


That has NO correlation to what the work sells for. The gross overvaluing of this stuff is because of his name, celeb status, and the investment value of the pieces- not because the pieces have a value, but because of the value put on them that they are traded at. they're very much like Tech shares in that. Like the way start-up dot-coms in the late 90's were "worth" 300 million and so on, when all they consisted off were e-mail sites and so on.

If you don't get that that stuff, you don't understand modern art at the level that Hurst's work in on. ;)

Any negative feeling towards him is generally for two reasons:
1. Cynascism regarding celebrities, especially those who believe in their own celebrity mythos (Hurst seems too).
2. Simply being appalled at the obviousness of the fraud- not Hurst at all this time; just the fact people misunderstand the mechanism and think that THIS is what fine art is really about. It's NOT "money for art", it's money for money. At this level whatever the celebrity "artist" puts their name on is almost quite literally gold (except it's worth more).


---------------------------------------------

Although for some, with no formal art background to speak off, I could understand that it all looks fairly similar, whether an artists is selling chalk images on the side of the road for $20, or selling insulations through Christies to BP for $250 million. But I assure you, it's not. That world has many tiers and levels... If you're really interested in fine art, then you'd be best off looking at people that haven't gone to the celeb level yet. As I say, with Hurst it'd be like being interested in music but Britiny Spears as the the music artist you were focussing on.

I do see your point, but my fine art background leads me to a slightly different conclusion: conceptual art is making a canvas of the current celebrity fervour, commenting on it, even participating in it and Hirst's work resonates.
Slightly outdated now but the very existence of this thread demonstrates that it still resonates.
That rack of fag buts is as old as Duchamp and so are the comments that greet it. Well done Damien!

Aren't my spelling mistakes charming? :)

I don't think Hirst comments on his status so much as lives it. Now an artist like Jeff Koons really DID send it all up in a very deliberate way with all his pieces. With artists like Hirst, people just think that about him, because that makes him more palatable and understandable to them, but the man himself and his contemporaries tend to be very serious about the whole thing in reality.
Like Duchamp, yes, but Duchamp after he started to believe in his ready-mades, not the Duchamp that thought of the whole thing as a clever joke.

A great example of an artist as a celeb that really did work with it and send it up constantly was the high school art student fave: Dali

I haven't even heard of this guy before. Probably because I'm not into contemporary fine art at all. I could stand to know a little more.

When it comes to value and art, I tend to look aside. No matter what, it's always subjective. Someone might have a billion dollar spoon used by some king long ago, I wouldn't care - wouldn't dare touch it, not for that price. (Or any price. It's just a spoon. It's even something I could use, as opposed to this guy's work, or a $3 mil gold calendar.)

So if someone says "this work is worth $463,000,000," I think, "Okay." Fine arts is obviously in its own realm. It's not smashed in our face every day, like supposedly attractive and equally talentless musicians.

Ozoneocean
I don't think Hirst comments on his status so much as lives it.

Agreed. His work doesn't really play on the celebrity status, rather I would say, celebrity satus has been courted to an extent by the nature of the work (he does what?) which is excellent tabloid fodder, or at least, he keeps that element going alongside his other non-controvercial work. That status then feeds back into his approach to the work, so it's more the process rather than the individual pieces that play on celebrity.

That said, it comes down to whether or not you think the work stands up on it's own merits. Have another objective (as possible) scan through those images before dismissing him as a .... wait a minute... this is practically what you said again isn't it?

ozoneocean

Skullbie

Koshou
I don't get all the hate.

Artistic ego envy, only the people who try to actually make money with art get it. It creates a bile that fouls their language everytime someone mentions an artist who will make more money in one auction then they will in their entire lives. lol!

Any negative feeling towards him is generally for two reasons:
1. Cynascism regarding celebrities, especially those who believe in their own celebrity mythos (Hurst seems too).
2. Simply being appalled at the obviousness of the fraud- not Hurst at all this time; just the fact people misunderstand the mechanism and think that THIS is what fine art is really about. It's NOT "money for art", it's money for money. At this level whatever the celebrity "artist" puts their name on is almost quite literally gold (except it's worth more).

Yeah, it's good old fashioned egotism. They're jealous this guy had the brains to build a 'brand' off himself hoisting him to celeb status in the art world therefore allowing him to sell, in essence, himself for millions of dollars on art projects they think they could have done in high school-their ego won't allow them to see it's envy. They thinly mask it as 'pride for real art' and not doing it for money but if you put any one of those bozo's ranting their heads off in Hurst's position they'd skin out joy as the hypocrites they really art.

Art has been given worth depending on who created it for centuries- be dead, alive, whatever, this is no different. No one gives a shit about that graduate who's selling the embalmed dead horse for 1000$, the fancy rich want names of value in their household, it brings worth to them having a famous artist instead of some nobody's horse.

Ozone
You obviously don't know much about "art" at the level...

Says a nobody horse ;)

I dont hate on this guy for selling for that much....although according to an article in artreview magazine (yes I do read fine art magazines) the auction was only driven up so high due to underbidding by his partner.

and talking to other artists, Hirst is viewed more as a celebrity than an artist...thus not a "true artist"....one of my old teachers called him a huckster.

My opinion is, when it comes to this level of fine art, it really becomes less and less about what you actually create and more about the name attatched to it. artreview made a list of the 100 most powerful people in the art world....and maybe only 20-30 of them were actual artists...the rest were gallery owners, curators, and collectors. that tells you alot about the fine art world that the people in power arent even the artists. its a very political world. its why i always say every aspiring artist should watch art school confidential. talent has nothing to do with making it big. everyone has 'talent". its all about how well you can shmooze people.

Skullbie

Yeah, it's good old fashioned egotism. They're jealous this guy had the brains to build a 'brand' off himself hoisting him to celeb status in the art world therefore allowing him to sell, in essence, himself for millions of dollars on art projects they think they could have done in high school-their ego won't allow them to see it's envy. They thinly mask it as 'pride for real art' and not doing it for money but if you put any one of those bozo's ranting their heads off in Hurst's position they'd skin out joy as the hypocrites they really art.



I'm not really jealous of his name. I've had people buy some of my paintings that i thought were absolute shit because they looked at the back and saw the stencil I sign pieces with on it. I have my own local level of notoriety which suffices for my ego and it wasn't remarkably hard to manage. All it took was to be the only guy doing what I do in the way I do it and be doing it better than others who picked it up after me. Building a rep isn't tough. It's all about how well you advertise. And that advertising can be as simple as putting a tag on the side of freight cars a couple of nights or as complex as designing 20 billboards with your name on them and getting a bunch of gallery openings.

I just don't see dunking a cow into a big vat of formaldehyde as all that particularly difficult or interesting. Mostly it's just unusual. It's a very straightforward process and I'm willing to bet he probably spend more time acquiring the materials and permission to dunk the cow in the formaldehyde than he actually spent doing the dunking. Maybe it's because I'm in art school where a large portion of the students like to do pieces based off of politics or religious commentary, and they like to do pieces with techniques like this, but I'm not impressed at all. To me, the time invested and technical difficulty of it, just doesn't quite justify the price.

That being said, I thought the butterfly mural if fairly straightforward, was gorgeous and it was one of the cheaper ones.

Skullbie
more stuff

lol!
No Skull, Iba and Ironscarf have it better.

You'd be right if you were talking about even someone like Madonna, but in this case you're... Well, you don't know enough about the subject. As I say, at this level, it's different. The man hasn't built his own brand, he doesn't work like that, Hirst and his contemporaries are in a position similar to Pollock and Rothko in the 50's: they were boosted to a crest of a wave by a storm of critical interest, value was assigned to their works, and now people trade in it.

I don't know if you get that, but it's like this:
I decide that anything lba makes is superdooper amazingly humpaliscious. I tell my billionaire friends that he's hot stuff and they should buy his work. Suddenly pieces that lba makes are set at values like $100. My billionaire friends don't pay that money for the pieces because they care for the art, they pay that money for the pieces because it's a safe investment that will increase in value. It converts all that cash into something small, solid, easy to move and store, with other benefits in tax concessions as well ;)
And eventually it can be converted into cash again along with a tidy profit.

And during all this, lba is nothing but the poor monkey making the stuff for the big boys to use in the movement of their money. -if it wasn't his work, it'd be shares, gold, etc.

In Hirst's case (and some of his contemporaries), they seem to think they're more than the monkey.
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Your dead or alive thing is quite off. The value and meaning of fine art has changed a lot over the centuries, it never means the same thing. When people trade in the works of dead artists today, it is indeed the same as buying a Hirst work, but that sort of trade has only ever come to the fore in the 20th C and it's usually focussed on the art of dead painters. Hirst and a few artists in the 20th C were the the first ones fortunate to benefit from some of that high level trade while alive. In the 19th C this high level trade culture was in its infancy, but it was confined to a very few, usually European aristocracy. And before that it didn't exist at all to speak off; You had trade in famous work by famous artists, and living artist with wealthy patrons, but for different motivations- most obviously the way we look at and trade in investments in the 20th c (or 21st C), didn't exist then in the way it does now. So the values were considerably lower and because of the mechanisms of the culture then, it was very difficult for a living artist to reach the a high level or value for his or her works, or a high level of fame. Quite a lot of the fame your read about was posthumous. ;)

--------------------

You could even say that a lot of the negativity here comes from the way people look at and misunderstand the man and his work. It's like someone looking at Brittany spears, noting her fame a wealth and thinking that is some kind of proof that she's a genius and a brilliant musician. When in reality, she's an artefact and an avatar of the corporate music industry- it was THAT which created the wealth, the fame and the image, the person is just the fragile human face on it.

huh!?

lba
Every year at MIAD where I go to school, several freshman do projects with stomped out cigs from the student unions outdoor ashtrays and they smell godawful. Like what happens if you were to rub a wet dog all over the most fouls smelling tobacco you could find. It must take some serious reputation to be able to sell something that rank for 3.2 million.

And now that I've flipped through those more slowly, with the exception of the Angel, platinum/diamond skull and silver statue, they're more like science displays that got screwed up than art. Most of the pieces seem to consist of dunking a farm animal into formaldehyde and giving it a name.

Aside here, you go to MIAD(Milwaukee institute of Art and Design)? I had friends from high school that went there. Coooool.

this is sick stuff.

Is that the bad kind of "sick"?

It seems you have discovered the Andy Kaufman [en.wikipedia.org] of art. ;) Is it really art....or is he mocking the fact that we think it's art, and pay millions of dollars for it?

If the latter is the case, then maybe this guy is a performance artist. ;)

Does anyone know where he sources his animals from? Are they simply dead animals or does he get someone to kill them for the projects?

One thing that bothers me about Hirst's work is how little involvement he has in the developmental process.