History shows that as societies decline due to war, so does the nature and quality of their art – was 20th C Europe any different?
Or early 21st C America?

Personally, I like the size. It is correct. Ron Mueck may have found that size also.

Anyway, artists and those who love them (family or fans) also tend to get extremely defensive when someone gets famous doing something they don’t see as worthwhile. It’s hard not to, when you’re laboring in a field with such a harshly focused distribution of wealth. The business of making money with art is attention, and he’s soaking up attention like a sponge.

Art as a whole is not a zero-sum game, however, and it’s entirely possible that Hirst is drawing persuadable individuals to art. Whether the reaction is due to anger or enjoyment, it’s probably good for the community.

Hip Hop Flying Spaghetti Monster? ;)

Yes art should stir and people provoke thought.

Goya’s work has very direct social commntary and criticism.

Dada and surrealism were existential terrorist movements which were directly respond to specific social conditions(the world wars) and also were a protest a against the then stifling conventions of academic art.

I will say it again. I enjoy much of the work that is produced under Damien Hirst’s name.

but

HE IS NO REBEL!

in fact is HE IS THE VERY PEAK OF MAINSTREAM SUCCESS in the institutional Art world!

The only reason that his work is controversial is because of the vast sums of money and resources that surround it.
It is visually interesting
but
It is not offensive.
I don’t think anyone on this board has said they were offended by the content of the work.
What is there to be offended by?
It would be like being offended by a Faberge egg!

Art always exists in a social context, and with the global disasters caused over the years by the concentration of wealth and power, i think it is very valid to mention those factors in reference to his products.

When we look a Faberge egg now, we see not just the egg but a decadent, feeble-minded Czar who eventually got his comeuppance. You bet Anastasia cried in vain. Excessive concentration of wealth CAUSES violent death.

The diamond encrusted skull is a just down payment on blood on the pavement.

While I’ll concede that it all comes down to personal preference, still, I have to disagree with this one.

There’s plenty to be said even about a picture that is “merely” pretty, as long as you want to spend some time thinking about it. Sure, I get what you’re saying: some kinds of art are really nothing more than decoration. Scarcely more than *design*.

But something that is truly sublime doesn’t need specially trained interpreters to say what needs to be said. It’s primal message, no matter how complex, is there to be apprehended by anyone and everyone. If an artist actually puts enough care and thought into his work to get his message across effectively, well then, what is left to be said that absolutely *must* be said?

Works by artists like Hirst really aren’t challenging. Which isn’t to say they aren’t in any way pleasing. (A bag of Doritos can also be pleasing, but you’d be mad to just slap a fat price tag on it, make it really humongous and then attempt to pass it off as haute cuisine.) They don’t make me think anything other than, “There’s a new sucker born every minute.” Which is part of the reason they irk so many people. If you want to feel ripped off, there’s no need to trot down to the nearest museum: just read the politics section of your local paper.

When I set aside some of my irreplaceable Life Time to visit a gallery, I don’t want to settle for something “experiential”. The world is bursting at the seams with experiences. I can find them pretty much anywhere. And if I want to stretch the definition of Art until it becomes meaningless, well, I don’t even have to get out of bed for that.

What I want is that sense that someone, somewhere, really cares enough to Get It Right, to tease out the tough truths and use them to create something more complex, more dense with information, more well considered and balanced and startling than a Really Big Toy.

When it comes to toys, by the way, I’m a huge fan of novelty and clever gimmicks. When it comes to the fine arts, generally speaking, I prefer something sublime.

Dada is much more than just painting or museum art, as it encompassed film, photography, poetry and performance as well. Dada also expanded modes of creativity by introducing and popularizing collage, photomontage, and assemblage, as well as film as a fine art medium. Far from being a dead end, Dada has had a huge effect, influencing Surrealism, Conceptualism, Fluxus and post-modernism, among many others.

One goal of Dada was to explode and expand on popular conceptions of what art ‘is,’ and particularly, that it is beyond aesthetics, following the belief that art should reflect the many facets of life, not just the pretty ones. While feelings of anger, disorientation and counfoundment are uncomfortable for some, they run far deeper than the sentimental cloying draftsmanship of, say, Rockwell, or his heir Kincade, whose talents lie in exploiting the artificial, the superficial and the sentimental. It’s no mistake where their work hangs, or where Fountain sits.

I’m of mixed feelings about Hirst, and have a deep dislike of Koons, yet I realize there is something more there than I personally can dig. Above all, what separates art from representation is that it challenges the viewer to reconsider what they are viewing. Agree with his work or not, Hirst is closer to this spirit than fluffy watercolorists pumping out endless pastel sunsets.

Exactly what I was going to say.

Another interesting artist to check out is Jeff Koons – http://www.jeffkoons.com/site/index.html

(And I really like some of Koons’ work.)

Frankly, all these vitriolic attacks on him make me that much more interested in his work.

Ad hominim attacks on the artist himself (he’s such a pompous self-centered jerk, etc) should have absolutely no bearing on one’s assessment of that artist’s work, unless your only interest in him is through the celebrity gossip pages, rather than through the art pages. If I refused to listen to any music or watch any films that were made by assholes, my CD and DVD collection would be dramatically smaller and the loss would be mine. The-artist-is-a-jerk is a really small minded argument for dismissing a work of art.

As for the notion that the artist must be some kind of solitary, original, genius creator? This is an artifact of the early 19th century, and it hasn’t held up very well.

Try this out instead: The artist is someone who helps us to see something we’ve already seen and dismissed in a new, interesting way.

Try

If it weren’t for the vehement anti-Hirst sentiment among some critics and art-lovers raising the hackles of self-appointed defenders of “real art” he’d have almost no “sizzle” in his metaphorical art-steak.

As someone pointed out earlier in the comments, the real rebels in British art (if such a thing exists) are the “Stuckists” (a “remodernist” group of figurative painters). They are often dismissed, mocked, and ignored by the movers and shakers of the art world, so they must be doing something right, right?

Nowadays, it makes far more sense to “re-contextualize” most famous galleries as banks, with artists in the role of “engravers” who have the freedom to make their currency look any which way they want — as long as it’s more or less a consistent product — with an exchange rate agreed upon by a few auction houses and critics.

“Our bank accepts the following currencies as legal tender:

* Sharks in formaldehyde

* 50 ft replicas of educational kids’ toys

* Urinals

* Pictures of soup cans

* Slashed canvases…”

See how much cooler “re-contextualizing” a thing makes it?

(I mean, no offense, but if you want to give some poor 7th grade kid really rich and satisfying nightmares, try dropping a perfectly life-like human liver/brain/small intestine on her desk.)

Yes, i’m aware there’ve always been artists who work with assistants, apprentices etc.

I don’t demand that a photographer do all of their own developing, or that a sculptor must build their own foundry. (although in both cases they probably should)

Koons and Hirst manage the corporate production of luxury novelty goods for the super rich.

Calling them artists is like calling Philip H. Knight (co-founder of NIKE) a “cobbler”.
Its just NOT an accurate description.

I could go on about the melding of the western myths of the “genius” and post-religion celebrity cult, with the ideal of the Ayn Randian capitalist UBERman.

but for now i’m sticking to: Where does the line lie for a descriptive word having its meaning corrupted by nu-speak?

There now exists an art-making industry that has far more in common with the film-making industry than with the a starving painter laboring alone in the garret. The language used to describe this industry should reflect the reality.

UC, much of the Abstract movement was based on the denial of representation, stating that their work is what it is, not a represention of something else. All representation is not art, at least until it transcends its basic utility, a la the difference between Shephard Fairey’s Obama and the original AP photo representation.

To ‘edify, amuse, entertain and enlighten’ seems to me to be a best expected outcome, however, artists by and large tend to get there by following their own instincts. Nothing wrong with sentiment, just that it tends to turn the work into something else.

Largely, the issue is that there are many facets of art, and that art overlaps, but is not totally congruent with notions of aesthetic beauty. For example, flowers and sunsets are beautiful, but they are not art. You may hang a picture of a sunset in your house, or paint a picture of a flower, and they are at least artworks, if not art. The flower paintings of Van Gogh and Monet are now considered great works of art because they changed the rules, showing new ways of represention that went beyond the strictly figurative. That’s pretty accepted today, but in their time, they were considered scandalous at best by the mainstream, shocking their audiences and the establishment. (The Dadaists were far from the first movement to attack the establishment, that honor going to the Renaissance)

Now, the extent that art ‘runs deeper’ than representation largely correlates to the sustained effect it has, both visually and intellectually. Like Hirst or not, his work has succesfully challenged viewers and BBers alike to ponder at length the extent that it is art, notwithstanding the role of commercialism in his work.

On the other hand, pretty pictures are shallow in that there is not a lot that can be said about them other than ‘I like it–it makes me feel good.’ Nothing wrong with pretty pictures, just that they often exist for their own sake, not as part of the continuum of the canon of art. Everyone is always free to hang and enjoy whatever artworks they want on their own walls, but that’s a personal thing.

Bah.
Hans Arp’s premonition has been realized: gangsters are using art to control people’s minds….now, torture is a necessity…

The curator of an art gallery makes a value judgment, declaring a biggie-sized knock-off of a toy to be the work of an Art God.

Along comes a fellow who isn’t affiliated with the gallery. But let’s imagine he happens to have enjoyed a massive amount of art. He too makes a value judgment. “No, not a God. I mean, it’d be rockin’ if it was in the window of a toy store, but that ain’t especially brilliant. Nope, just the work of a mortal.”

Who’s being sillier?

And MKultra, Duchamps too was a hack, and a charlatan: this entire line of artists using “ready-mades” are.

It may be art (as is anything created by human artifice): but it’s very very far from being ‘great’ or even ‘good’ art.

But there is no accounting for taste: and some appear to enjoy the taste of ordure….