Damien Hirst

Flesh Tint by Damien Hirst (2016)

REVIEWS

Miklos Legrady

It’s not a bad work considering that it’s by an anonymous artist hired by Damien Hirst in exchange for a weekly salary.  Hirst is not the first whose assistants do all his work but that’s a recent phenomenon; assistants in the past copied the master’s work for sale to the middle class. In 1617, Sir Dudley Carleton protested to Rubens that paintings offered to him as by the hand of the artist himself were in fact largely the work of his studio. Rubens was quick to replace them with works he could vouch for as being entirely his own - it would not do to acquire a reputation for passing off inferior work as original. 

That’s not the case here. Hirst hires bright artists to think up ideas and he hires skilled painters to actually paint the image. Imagine if you love soap and enjoy making all kinds in your shed for the sheer love of it. Friends buy some then word of mouth brings you more business so you get a bank loan and open a factory, where you sit at a desk looking after the business.  But now others make the soap, which is what you loved doing.  Instead you sit at a desk.  That’s what happened to Damien Hirst.  As an artist life is a bit more festive; you go to lots of parties.  We need to ask what is art, why make art?
M.L.

Mary Fletcher

This picture reminds me of colour blindness tests, but it doesn't have a number within which only the not-colour-blind can see. Does this colour blind reference refer to anti-racism? It is also reminiscent of charts used by campaigners on which people use markers to indicate their views. The title Flesh Tint is puzzling.  Does it mean it takes all colours to make humanity?

When at college in 1968 I made a sculpture using coloured balls on a circular platform on bed springs. When the platform was touched the balls moved at random, bumping into one another, as I felt people did in meeting. Damien Hirst exhibited, with others of this series of spot paintings that are not placed on a grid like his earlier ones, ping pong balls of various colours, blown about by machine in a confined space - maybe a similar idea. He speaks of these paintings as like cells. They could represent atoms.

Critics have slated them as bad paintings. They say their exhibition, 2018, at a stately home in Norfolk, was a gimmick to get paying visitors there for the aristocrat who owns 18th-century Houghton Hall and to sell Hirst's work at high prices. The family portraits were removed temporarily to install these paintings in the grandly decorated rooms.

Does it imply the family portraits were of mortals as unimportant in the long run as any other collections of atoms that make a person?
M.F.

Pendery Weekes

This reminds me of a busy Chinese beach where millions of people are trying to get cool at the same time, while it also makes me think of the beautiful fabric of my grandmother’s handmade dresses. Then I remember it’s a painting by Damien Hirst, 'the' Damien Hirst, the artist who made The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (a shark in formaldehyde). Then again, it looks like my cous-cous gone bad with a myriad of colours of mould. (Be sure to wash your hands afterwards, as it might also be contagious.)

Flesh Tint must have taken an infinity of hours to complete, even if he used assistants to paint this; my patience would have gone out the window after the first 50 points. Try and guess their number, and who gets the closest number wins a prize; instead, we must guess the tints of flesh that we see here. Are they bodies, human bodies? Can one stay in the foreground, in the background, or is it just one jumble to create paranoia?

I believe Hirst is one of the few artists who really has fun with his work, which can be seen from all the variety of styles he plays and experiments with through his paintings and sculptures. He says of his spot paintings, “I think of them as cells under a microscope.” It could be a throwback to the bacteria and microorganisms of single cells. What’s next Maestro Hirst? You’re only 54 years old.
P.W.

Bart Gazzola

Joseph Stalin once upbraided his son for exploiting his father's name: “But I'm a Stalin too,” said Vasily. “No, you're not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin ... Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”

The Cedar Tavern Singers, in their jauntily caustic 'The Physical Impossibility of Damien Hirst in the Mind of the Living' (satirizing his most famous work's title) go further: “He's a YBA artist that's right why be an artist when you can just take the piss???!!”

It's impossible to extricate Hirst's artwork from his persona: his performed identity is more Cesare Borgia than Cecily Brown. Proliferation leads to a keener awareness of the poverty of his aesthetic. But let's turn that on its head: if Flesh Tint was by anyone else, would I so smugly dismiss it? Would I give it a more rigorous examination, attempting to discern – even projecting – a greater relevance into this work?

Well, you can't have it both ways. In a bizarre horror story I read years ago, a person so 'colourful' he has inspired numerous characters by countless authors, is 'stalked' and kidnapped by famous fictional characters, imprisoned in a library basement because he exists more 'truly' to many as a dramatis persona than as a person. 

Hirst is less artist than caricature (but it's said an age gets the art it deserves), and Flesh Tint is a recycled 'appropriated' 'postmodernist' Seurat (no offence, Georges). 
B.G.