Perhaps we should have pity for Damien Hirst. Artistic decline is a terrible fate, even if you have immense wealth to cushion the blow. What artist, what person, wants to think all the good stuff is in the past? But Hirst apparently does think that. He could hardly confess it more clearly than by pre-dating formaldehyde animal sculptures made in 2017 to the 1990s, as whistleblowers have revealed to the Guardian.
The young Damien Hirst lived fast and thought constantly about death. At 16 he posed for a photo with a severed head in a Leeds morgue. As an emerging artist he came up with a totally new spin on the ancient theme of the memento mori by putting dead animals, including a four-metre-long tiger shark, in tanks of formaldehyde and exhibiting them as art. Dry, dusty disputes over whether readymade objects can be art paled into irrelevance before Hirst's reminders of our fleshy fragility - and for a generation that had grown up with Jaws it was a nightmare come to life.
It was Hirst that came into my mind, not Rembrandt, as I paced the hospital where my mum was having heart surgery in the 1990s. I have told Hirst that. I also truthfully told him that he helped inspire me to become an art critic. That shark changed my life.
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