Hey, it could have been worse. Hirst had to postpone this show from last September. “The new cow piece replaces the one I really wanted to do,” he said, “the dead cows f-ing, without formaldehyde. We called up the environmental department and told them what we’d have: rotting animals, but with filters to clean the air. They said if you do that, we’ll shut you down.”
But city bureaucrats couldn’t shut down the art world’s hope for a succs de scandale, especially in this flat market. Ever since Manet outraged 1865 Paris by painting a prostitute as a goddess-like “Olympia,” artists have pushed the envelope of propriety. Back in the dada days, Marcel Duchamp tried to put a urinal in a sculpture show. In the 1960s, Piero Manzoni canned his own excrement, and Hermann Nitsch splattered himself with animal blood and guts. Andy Warhol made paintings in the ’70s by peeing on canvases. Jeff Koons rang in the ’90s with explicit pictures of himself and his Italian porn-star wife. Each of these gambits caused a little stir and kept the artist’s name afloat in the sea of novelty.
It’s tougher to shock the bourgeoisie today-what with Jerry Springer’s TV show, A. M. Homes’s novels and Ultimate Fighting on pay-per-view. The New York Times critic found he liked Hirst’s show, A. M. Homes’s novels and Ultimate Fighting on pay-per-view. The New York Times critic found he liked Hirst’s show. Advertising mogul Charles Saatchi has reportedly bought the cow piece for a cool half million. Oh, there was some sniffing at the opening-by a writer who said he’d have to delay his dinner reservations a couple of hours, and an artist who claimed he did a dead dog 20 years ago.
Hirst’s dead animals aren’t all that horrible to look at-nothing you couldn’t see in a science museum. In fact, the delicately gray, pearly innards revealed in Hirst’s surgical cross-sections and walled in by Plexiglass are strangely beautiful. Think wet industrial design. As sculpture, the row of 12 tall tanks, containing alternating sections of two cows facing in opposite directions, has a certain minimalist grandeur. There isn’t much of a moral issue here, either. Hirst buys animals from a slaughterhouse that have already died of natural causes. Even the vegetarian who was leafleting outside the gallery said she wasn’t outraged; to her Hirst’s show is just an occasion for consciousness-raising about “our attitude toward animals in general.”
If Hirst galls anybody in the art world, it’s because he’s perceived as both gratuitous and capricious. His animal pieces don’t appear to address any social issues. The overstuffed Gagosian show, entitled “No Sense of Absolute Corruption,” also includes large, brightly colored circular “spin” paintings, a giant ashtray filled with butts and-the artist’s favorite piece -a beach ball hovering in blown air. The show might as well be called “The Wacky World of Damien Hirst.”
So is this just publicity-stunt art, with no real meaning? Hirst began to talk about “Mother and Child Divided,” the bisected cow-and-calf work that caused a buzz at the 1993 Venice Bienniale. Finishing his beer, he revealed that when he was 12, his just divorced mother told him his car-salesman father was actually his stepfather. “Can you read this into my work?” he asked with a rhetorical wink. “‘Mother and Child Divided’? No, I don’t think so.” Make that a nice, very self-conscious guy.
