Damien Hirst and the New Mental Problem – On the Present-day Art Industry

Damien Hirst’s considerably touted compilation of agglomerated objects, ‘beautiful in my head forever’, a pretentious assembly of second-level rubbish unusually commonplace in conception and void of any qualitative material, has now been consecrated art by the art-acquiring community, a no modest feat! What a splendid accomplishment by the small but cunning ‘business intelligentsia’ masterminding what can now contemptuously be identified as the present-day artwork scene. Many thanks to a formidable campaign, to software and system, the art marketplace has been created to feel that what we see in this article is art and that it’s worth income. The success reaped by these manipulating forces is whole. The environment is observing and nevertheless it does not question a 2nd. The psychological leap is as giant and as unbelievable as the 9/11 rip-off. The Emperor’s-new-outfits-syndrome appears to be a human constituent. The manipulator’s war cry resounds above the even now smoking battlefield: ‘if you want to get absent with it, do it in the open up for anyone to see’.

Are we then completely insane? Do we just require to be fed insanities to feel them? Does the so known as art collector purchasing these items maintain on believing when deal with to facial area and at house?

The Jeff Koons exhibition at Versailles exhibits the gravity of this condition of affairs. Even without the need of the auction-space ecosystem, respectable men and women look presently to believe that just about anything goes, anything, be it to any sub-typical, be it just for the sake of celebrity, something goes as extensive as it is sensational.

The specialists have carefully comprehended how to manipulate to maximum profit the exasperating mass of just-believing-anything at all ‘art collectors’ (i.e. apparent idiots with income). In this part, Hirst is not even original but just faithfully adhering to the examples of Duchamp and Warhol. Their easy functioning principle is: the far more evidently stupid the creation, the far more the perplexed parvenu artwork-collector will want it. In this commodity sector, where the commodity has almost nothing to do with magnificence nor feeling, and not even with any individual interest, the only important and completely primordial position is taken up by buzz.

The apparent response is that we are, in excellent majority, nonetheless not out of our minds. The stunning prices paid out through the Sotheby’s celebration problems an infinitesimal smaller part of the artwork-obtaining general public and the most striking revelation of this action is the thoughts-boggling complete amount of money these potential buyers have to dispose of in purchase to commit such sums on crap. Even out of speculative causes no one in his appropriate brain will pay nearly anything like that in the hope of acquiring one more sucker on the brief expression. This is prestige and internal-circle display-off and nothing at all else.

However, the repercussions of these inflated gross sales activities are reverberating down the ladder to get to and contaminate the prevalent world. The most harmful consequence of this absurd circus is that artwork tends to be valued in superstar conditions. Neither shortage nor quality will assurance financial value, only celeb will.