> In some fairly recent threads here I was complaining about
> Damien Hirst and praising Andy Warhol.
Would Andy praise Damien today ...?
> I can see the distinction between the two might not
> always be clear, but it's becoming more so.
It had better be clear: 50 years is a long time for some of these ideas to have gone nowhere.
> Hirst has always been about corporate sponsored marketing, beginning
> when he was still in school.
But there's been a large transformation in the "art market" between these two guys, and not much of it is directly because of either of them. Art had only started to become the corporate touchstone ("asset class") that it is today by the time of Andy's demise. And so of course Damien is a product of that change. Hirst has become the canonical example, the most extreme. But there's an awful lot of pretenders that have come along with it.
Why you'd want to compare him with Warhol is beyond me.
> Meanwhile, what he's selling has gotten less and less interesting.
> That never happened with Warhol.
So we're back to "I don't like it" are we?
My response to Hirst has always been: "Of course; and why the hell not?"
That "critique" you linked seems to be a laundry list of "talking points against" which just underscores that Hirst is unique and has achieved his intention of crashing through boundaries; of course he doesn't stack up against this guy's ("Oh no, the market price of 1,100 of seemingly the same paintings might crash!"). If that's not Art, then what is? Art isn't like sport: there's room for a million "winners" (unlike, say, "Super Bowl Champions"), and the fact that there isn't, afterall, a million of them speaks to the enduring challenge of Art. To me? Hirst is a winner.
/jordan