Damien Hirst
Sarah Kent
Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his Whitechapel retrospective feel like a rediscovery – incredibly fresh and immediate.Stepping into the main gallery, you are infused with a supreme sense of calm. Hanging from the ceiling is a Newton’s cradle – 18 glass orbs suspended a few inches apart on fine wires (main picture). Glowing golden yellow, these fragile vessels are serenely beautiful. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith's documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and celebs including Marianne Faithfull, Damien Hirst and Terence Stamp to create a portrait of a man capable of effervescent wit and charm, yet fuelled from within by a monstrous darkness.The film lit the blue touch paper by looking at Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which, when exhibited in London in 1945, did little to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The second exhibition staged by Damien Hirst in his stunning Newport Street Gallery is of work from his collection by the American artist, Jeff Koons. Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths when, in 1987, Charles Saatchi showed Koons and other young Americans at his gallery in St John’s Wood. Hirst was blown away by the freshness and ambition of work that took Warhol’s love affair with consumer culture one stage further. This mini-retrospective can be seen, then, as a tribute both to Saatchi and Koons – inspirational figures in the 1980s. A huge, sugar-pink bowl filled with Read more ...
fisun.guner
Things you might know about Oslo: it’s expensive and the cost of a beer, wine, dinner for two – whatever your tourist yardstick – might make your hair stand on end (the cost of living is currently second only to Singapore city, according to a 2014 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit); it’s small (population: 600,000), yet it’s also the fastest growing capital in Europe, thanks to both overseas immigration and the fact that many Norwegians are now moving to the capital; its most celebrated son is, of course, Edvard Munch.Luckily, it’s art, not the beer or the exchange rate, that’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
Feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feeeelings. Just like that Morris Albert hit of the Seventies for star-crossed lovers everywhere, I lost count of the number of times I heard that word in this Alan Yentob meets Jeff Koons love-in. Or, more precisely, “feeling” singular, since Koons, one of the most bankable artists in the world, was talking about the “feeeeling” aroused when you looked at one of his art works. The engendered feeling was, we learned, a cross between sex-lust, consumer-lust and religious transcendence – “transcendence” being another favoured Koons word. And left to his own words, Read more ...
fisun.guner
How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien Hirst, who some now imagine has been conning us all for years, but of the execrable Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga must be “exposed”! For is pap in pop really any lesser crime than art pap? You might think it is, even though, through the Nineties, both Britpop and Britart bobbed along on the crest of a Cool Britannia wave. They woz soulmates.We don’t expect Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As Damien Hirst’s Tate retrospective looms large on the horizon, the million-dollar question is whether the work has withstood the test of time. Will exciting and provocative sculptures like the pickled shark, which became an icon of Brit Art the minute it swam into view at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, still send shivers down the spine, or has it become too familiar to arouse anything more than a yawn of recognition?I hope the answer is yes, because many of my most treasured memories as a critic involve encounters with Hirst’s work and that of his fellow YBAs (Young British Artists). I’d been Read more ...
Sarah Kent
For me, 2011 will go down as the year in which the fact that artworks have become luxury goods – playthings for the rich – could no longer be ignored. In response Damien Hirst, one of the first artists to turn himself into a brand, is sprinkling the globe with spot paintings (pictured below left). In January, 300 of the 1,400 produced so far will be shown across the world in all 11 Gagosian galleries, from New York to California, London, Rome, Paris, Athens and Hong Kong. It's the art equivalent of saturation bombing, a tactic employed to stifle any lingering hint of resistance. Shock Read more ...
fisun.guner
Brace yourselves for pure Damien Hirst madness next year. As well as Tate Modern’s retrospective survey opening in April, there will be a “worldwide” retrospective of Hirst’s spot paintings opening next month.The Gagosian Gallery will be hosting the global exhibition of Hirst’s jaunty but dull spot paintings across all of its 11 galleries, from Hong Kong to Paris, and from New York to London, as well as in Los Angeles, Athens, Rome and Geneva.The simultaneous display will total more than 300 of the mostly studio assistant-painted works, from the first spot-on-board created in 1986, to a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Damien Hirst is finally getting his first UK retrospective in a public gallery next year, but the question seems to be, “Why now?” It seems both far too late and far too early, especially since Hirst has made no significant work in some years. That the Tate is organising it to coincide with the year of the Olympics, will, of course, be good for them: it will almost certainly see an unprecedented number of visitors, and tourists from around the world will flock to see it.But there’s no getting away from the sense that this doesn’t feel so much as a mid-career retrospective but a YBA autopsy Read more ...
fisun.guner
Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.If you tuned in last night, you Read more ...
josh.spero
The battleground: beauty. What’s at stake: our souls. At least on these two things philosophy don Roger Scruton (presenter of Why Beauty Matters) and art critic Waldemar Januszczak (presenter of Ugly Beauty) were agreed in the Modern Beauty season. For despite very different ideas of beauty, they both reached the same conclusion: it is there to nourish the soul.Which is why it may seem odd that their programmes consider the same examples and yet reach very different conclusions. Jeff Koons to one is shallow and materialistic, to the other a source of self-knowledge. Scruton finds Damien Hirst Read more ...