Damien Hirst’s shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde, recently sold for $12 million to US billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, is disintegrating and will need extensive conservation work to prevent it from further deterioration. This is the view of conservation scientists and natural history specialists who say that the bigger a specimen, the more difficult it is to preserve long-term in formaldehyde.
There are two ways to think about all of this. One, for sympathizers, is to view Mr. Hirst as a resourceful artist-philosopher with a broad, deep and comprehensive vision of modernity and its spiritual plight.
Detractors may see him as a clever showman trafficking in academic platitudes: a third-rate Warhol, a second-rate Koons.
Would it kill Johnson to mention that Walter Robinson "owned" ironic spin art abstraction in NY years before Hirst "discovered" it? You know Johnson knows about that, but it doesn't fit the mythmaking paradigm.
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- bill 2-05-2005 7:15 pm
There are two ways to think about all of this. One, for sympathizers, is to view Mr. Hirst as a resourceful artist-philosopher with a broad, deep and comprehensive vision of modernity and its spiritual plight.
Detractors may see him as a clever showman trafficking in academic platitudes: a third-rate Warhol, a second-rate Koons.
- bill 2-18-2005 6:02 pm [add a comment]
Would it kill Johnson to mention that Walter Robinson "owned" ironic spin art abstraction in NY years before Hirst "discovered" it? You know Johnson knows about that, but it doesn't fit the mythmaking paradigm.
- tom moody 2-18-2005 6:38 pm [add a comment]