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.
This story is from the March 29, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the March 29, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Finn family murals
The optimism that runs through Finnish artist Tove Jansson's Moomin stories also appears in her public works, now on show in a Helsinki exhibition
I hoped Finland would be a progressive dream.I've had to think again Mike Watson
Oulu is five hours north from Helsinki by train and a good deal colder and darker each winter than the Finnish capital. From November to March its 220,000 residents are lucky to see daylight for a couple of hours a day and temperatures can reach the minus 30s. However, this is not the reason I sense a darkening of the Finnish dream that brought me here six years ago.
A surplus of billionaires is destabilising our democracies Zoe Williams
The concept of \"elite overproduction\" was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs.
'What will people think? I don't care any more'
At 90, Alan Bennett has written a sex-fuelled novella set in a home for the elderly. He talks about mourning Maggie Smith, turning down a knighthood and what he makes of the new UK prime minister
I see you
What happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads? A new clinical trial reveals some surprising results
Rumbled How Ali ran rings around apartheid, 50 years ago
Fifty years ago, in a corner of white South Africa, Muhammad Ali already seemed a miracle-maker.
Trudeau faces 'iceberg revolt'as calls grow for PM to quit
Justin Trudeau, who promised “sunny ways” as he won an election on a wave of public fatigue with an incumbent Conservative government, is now facing his darkest and most uncertain political moment as he attempts to defy the odds to win a rare fourth term.
Lost Maya city revealed through laser mapping
After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have discovered a lost Maya city containing temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.
'A civil war' Gangs step up assault on capital
Armed fighters advance into neighbourhoods at the heart of Port-au-Prince as authorities try to restore order
Reality bites in the Himalayan 'kingdom of happiness'
High emigration and youth unemployment levels belie the mountain nation's global reputation for cheeriness
