In 1991, two years out of art school, Damien Hirst created a work now synonymous with the phrase ‘Young British Artists’. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living sees a 14-ft tiger shark slowly rotting in a vitrine filled with formaldehyde.
A woman views artwork by Damien Hirst entitled ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ in the Tate Modern art gallery on April 2, 2012 in London, England.
Thirty years on, Hirst seems as old hat as William Hogarth. Speaking in an interview recently, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, one of Hirst’s contemporaries, joked that ‘Hogarth was the first YBA’, suggesting his discomfort with the placeholder term.
Hogarth was 23 when he left his apprenticeship and set up shop offering silver engravings and copper etched plates for business cards and book illustrations. His painting career began in earnest when he was 30. Before Hogarth, there was no concept of ‘British’ art, only mainland European artists who sometimes practiced in the UK.
Yinka Shonibare, one of Hirst’s contemporaries, joked that ‘Hogarth was the first YBA’
There would be no Young British Artists without the wild fluctuations of the free market, and in particular the wealthy benefactor Charles Saatchi. Saatchi paid £50,000 for Hirst’s shark in 1991, after Hirst had spent £6,000 acquiring it off the coast of Australia. Now, it is one of the most valuable art works on the planet.
Hogarth was similarly a product of his time. You might see him as the first artist-entrepreneur. The early 18th century saw the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and a swelling middle class, who could afford to buy Hogarth’s prints for a shilling a piece; his paintings were almost adverts for them.
Satan, Sin and Death (A Scene from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’) c.1735–40
We see satirical cartoons in the newspapers all the time, and it’s hard to imagine a point in time when graphic satire didn’t exist – but the innovation was Hogarth’s. Likewise, while the Young British Artists seem a part of the establishment now, Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998) was the first time someone had shown their bed, Mark Quinn’s Self (1991) was the first time an artist had cast their own head using ten pints of blood, and so on.
This was art as idea, rather than art as craft. Hirst’s favourite retort to people complaining that ‘anyone could have done that’ was ‘but you didn’t.’ Of course, there’s no reason that art should be hard work, only that an artwork works on its own terms.
This was art as idea, rather than art as craft
Not so in Hogarth’s Britain. A series of engravings titled Industry and Idleness (1747) sees the young ‘prentice Thomas Idle sent to the gallows for his crime of Not Working Hard Enough.
Fast forward again to 1991 and to Hirst’s The Acquired Inability to Escape. Presented in another quasi-scientific vitrine that thus sets up comparison (or perhaps equivalence) with the shark is a black height-adjustable chair tucked into a white laminate office table with an ashtray sitting on top of it, alongside a pack of Silk Cut Purples – representing a burst of pleasure, but bad for your health, so I’ve heard. It’s as if the waters of the technocratic marketplace are just as perilous as the shark-infested.
ArrayThirty years on, however, I find that a bitter pill (another of Hirst’s favourite motifs) to swallow. By now, he has spent so long surfing the fluctuations of the free market that the art of but-you-didn’t has become the art of but-nobody-is-stopping-me. Subtly different.
His latest show at Gagosian Britannia Street – the second phase of a year-long takeover – sees paintings made from the desiccated husks of dead flies hung over gaudily ugly black butterfly wallpaper. Blatant symbolism, divisive, headline-grabbing – all these have long been features of Hirst’s oeuvre; only the society around the work has changed.
Blatant symbolism, divisive, headline-grabbing – all these have long been features of Hirst’s oeuvre; only the society around the work has changed.
In 1752, Hogarth made an engraving of Columbus Breaking the Egg. The story goes that at a meal, Columbus’ detractors began to comment that anyone could have found their way to the New World. Instead of replying ‘but you didn’t’, Columbus asked to be brought an egg and challenged those present to stand it on its end. After numerous attempts and failings, Columbus demonstrated how it was done: crush one end of the egg against the table, giving it a base to stand upright. Simple, after the fact. Hogarth used the story as an analogy for his own adventurous discoveries in the world of art.
But imagine if Columbus broke out the old egg trick at every damn dinner party. You’d soon start making up hair appointments and saying your dog ate your invite, not to suffer through it again.
Columbus Breaking the Egg, 1752
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with an artist interested in repetition, and if you’re going to pick a theme then ‘death’ strikes me as a good one. But there are ways of doing Death without doing it to death and ways of doing Death to death that leave you feeling gladder to be alive.
According to MD Daily Record, Hirst’s net worth is estimated to be around £540 million; as such, it’s tempting to read works such as For the Love of God (2007) – the infamous diamond-encrusted skull – as being less memento mori and more maligning the art market that will pay for it. But once again, Hogarth got there first.
Just like Hogarth, Hirst played a leading role in putting original and energetic British art on the world stage.
In 1764, six months before the artist’s death, Hogarth made one final engraving entitled The Bathos intended as a tailpiece to a bound edition of his engravings. Father Time has popped his clogs, exhaling FINIS in a plume of pipe smoke. All around him lie ruins – a broken bell, sun dial, a derelict sign for an inn called ‘The World’s End’.
The engraving’s full title reads: The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking, in Sublime Paintings, inscribed to the Dealers in Dark Paintings, with an equally wordy footnote: ‘See the manner of disgracing ye most Serious Subjects, in many celebrated Old Pictures; by introducing Low, absurd, obscene & often prophane Circumstances into them’. In other words, Hogarth is attacking the vogue for imported Old Masters paintings and their darkened varnish and the fashion for the ‘sublime’ in works of art.
For the Love of God, 2007
Just like Hogarth, Hirst played a leading role in putting original and energetic British art on the world stage. Unlike Hogarth, he has his cake and eats it, too: sublime and sinking, sacred and profane, Enfant terrible and entrepreneur, for better and worse, it’s physically impossible to imagine British art without him.
