Pickled Sharks and All

Regardless of what you may believe about Damien Hirst or think about his art it would not be stretching the truth to say he single-handedly resurrected the British contemporary art scene over the last 15 years.

Our favorite mainstream blogger on all things art, Jonathan Jones, revisits Hirst and his “pickled shark”.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

I had no job and didn’t know where I was going in life when I walked into the Saatchi Gallery in 1992 and saw a tiger shark swimming towards me. Standing in front of Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living in its original pristine state was a disconcerting and marvellous experience. The shark, then, did not look pickled, it looked alive. It seemed to move as you moved around the tank that contained it, because the refractions of the liquid inside which it “swam” caused your vision of it to jump as you changed your angle.

There it was: life, or was it death, relentlessly approaching me through deep waters. It was galvanising, energising. It was a great work of art.

I knew what I thought great art looked like. I doted on Leonardo da Vinci, I loved Picasso. I still revere them both. But it was Hirst’s shark that made me believe art made with fish, glass vitrines and formaldehyde – and therefore with anything – can be great. I found his work not just interesting or provocative but genuinely profound. As a memento mori, as an exploration of the limits of art, as a meditation on the power of spectacle, even as a comment on the shark-infested waters of post-Thatcherite Britain, it moved me deeply.

I’m looking forward to Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern because it will be a new chance to understand the power I have, in my life, sensed in his imagination and intellect. I think Hirst is a much more exciting modern artist than Marcel Duchamp. To be honest, the word “exciting” just doesn’t go with the word “Duchamp”. Get a load of that exciting urinal!

Picasso is exciting; Duchamp is an academic cult. The readymade as it was deployed by Duchamp gave birth to conceptual forms that are “interesting” but rarely grab you where it matters.

Hirst is more Picasso than Duchamp – the Picasso who put a bicycle seat and handlebars together to create a bull’s head. He’s even more Holbein than Duchamp – the Holbein who painted a skull across a portrait of two Renaissance gentlemen.

He is a giant of modern art.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst (1991). Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]