It has been lost in the endless, dense fog of machismo, shock stunts and money-grabbing avarice of his career, but at one point, Damien Hirst actually made some seriously moving, genuinely profound art.
He was at his best when meditating on death: a severed cow’s head being feasted on by flies, a pharmacy filled with pill bottles and, yeah, even that shark in a tank. Those were horrifying, wide-eyed confrontations of mortality. And here in Gagosian is another hundred of them. This is a show made up entirely of pickled animals. Nothing but death and formaldehyde.
They’re all recent-ish works, or recreations of old works. There are calves and sheep and sharks and piranhas, all floating for eternity in clear blue liquid. It still packs a punch, walking in and seeing a huge dead shark in a gallery. It still feels visceral and intense when it works, like with the crucified sheep, and the mutant calf. But some of it is incredibly bloody stupid. The dead fish mobile is so dumb it makes me wish art didnt exist, and the string of preserved sausages is living proof that Hirst doesn’t have any real friends, because real friends wouldn’t let him make something that shit.
And you might be asking ‘why now?’ Well, the answer is ‘money’. Hirst is regurgitating his greatest hits for profit, not for art. And by turning his best idea into a commodity on such an obvious, greedy scale, he’s stripped it of all its power. The emotion is gone, the idea is lost. Where once this was about death and loss, now it’s about investment portfolios and mortgages. It’s no longer gross because it’s dead animals, now it’s gross because it’s dead animals whose only purpose is to line Damien Hirst’s pockets, dead animals for some rich arsehole’s living room.
I don’t hate it, I just think it’s a waste. A waste of these animals’ lives, and a waste of art.
