Damien Hirst

Looking at Damien Hirst's famous shark is uncomfortable, because it tells us more than we want to know. A shark is something we are meant to be frightened of; yet when the fish is clearly dead, we enjoy a triumph, ecstatically confirmed in our perceived untouchability. And yet the very deadness of the shark is a cold rejoinder to this exact thought. What comes to the shark must come to us also. So to look at all, if we dare, is to lay ourselves open to a double reaction: Aristotle’s catharsis of relief, pity and fear. The chastening goes even deeper, however, because the shark is not just like us, it is better off, being preserved by chemicals, while we, comfortless, unseen, will rot in a dark earthbound cubicle, out of sight of the sky. The shark has achieved a sort of immortality. And strangely, it has a pathos to it: perhaps because the menace of sharks is a cartoonish thing, like the menace of uncovered manholes. Sharks kill very few people. Is, then, this titillation, this sublimated terror at the ocean’s great killer, in fact a distraction? Do we make up threats to blank out the real threat, of death’s inevitability? Surely this is what Hirst is driving at. Even when looking at a dangerous shark, our instinct to shy away from death remains. We put up obstacles – Look,a shark! – to avoid thinking about the genuine terror. These obstacles act as almost physical barriers: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. But here there is another pressing ambiguity: what about ‘Death in the mind’? After all, we cannot experience the death of the mind, while we are still alive – as Hopkins wrote, even when in despair, we ‘Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be’. While we are ‘someone living’, anyone living, Hirst tells us, we cannot be as badly off as a dead shark. This life-affirming note, surely, is the most resounding one from Hirst’s symphony of declarations and counter-declarations.

This kind of bollocks is even easier to write than Damien Hirst’s artworks are to think up – a point nicely proved by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. Conrad’s expansive meditations, like mine, have nothing to do with Damien Hirst’s creative brilliance. I could have said everything I said about a shark displayed in a shop window by an amateur fisherman. The point is not whether either shark ‘qualifies’ as art; the point is that any response to it comes because of the viewer’s imagination, not the displayer’s.

There is nothing unhealthy about this. Who knows, maybe there is something in what I said about mortality above, whatever it was. G.K. Chesterton once wrote a newspaper column based on observing banal things – a comment made by a child, the contents of his pockets, a railway station – and developing his responses into profound, poetic, cheerfully overblown crescendos. But the genius here is Chesterton’s: it is not that of the child, the printer of Chesterton’s used bus tickets, or the newspaper seller on the platform. None of these people could claim any real responsibility.

One way of looking at art is that we can see things from the perspective of someone completely different from us: an experience only otherwise gained through close relationships with other people. I feel I know G.K. Chesterton much better than I know most of the people I went to school with; and though I may never completely understand what it’s like to be a Roman Catholic, I can get much closer to it by reading Chesterton’s books. Damien Hirst’s works give us no clue what it would be like to be him – though we may well feel that it would be boring. They do not take us out of our own heads.
This is only one way of looking at art; there are others, but most of the ones hastily made up to justify Hirst’s fame are much sillier. Janet Street Porter in The Independent reveals that she owns a set of Hirst originals, and argues that ‘Great art's what you want it to be, and I want it to be provocative. No one does that better than Damien.’ Is this true? If we really are going to measure everything by how provocative it is, then putting a large fish in a large goldfish bowl is a limp effort. Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks was much more provocative; so is the choice as Vice-Presidential candidate of the ridiculous Sarah Palin. Provocation in art is valuable, but only as a byproduct of other more important effects.

'I won't ask any more questions / Then you can't tell me lies.'

It’s not hard to find meaning and complexity in mediocre art; we just need to remember that it’s our intelligence doing the work, not that of the mediocre artist. Pop songs are ideal for this kind of thing. We can uncover all kinds of metaphysical conundrums and profound doctrines in the work of Junior Senior and Blur, if we try hard enough. And we are confident that the artists themselves won’t contradict us. If they were such deep thinkers, why would they be making a living as pop stars?

We can be shaken from this complacency in only one way. That is, if a songwriter keeps impressing us, consistently throughout a song or an album. When it keeps happening, we have to consider that they might be genuinely talented. (Unless we’re Morrissey fans, in which case we’re certain our idol should be Prime Minister and Poet Laureate.)

This is about more than intelligence and eloquence – quite a lot of songwriters can do that. Joni Mitchell and Craig Finn and Lloyd Cole and Regina Spektor all clearly have a brain. But the genuinely poetic is harder to find, and I can only think of a couple of examples. In the case of David Gedge of The Wedding Present, I’m arrested by the psychological truth of his songs.



There’s nothing showy about Gedge's words – but they resonate. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that listening to Gedge is like overhearing one end of an especially memorable phone call on a train. Indeed, many Wedding Present songs are one side of a conversation, including this gem:


Give My Love to Kevin


Why should I want to know his name?
What difference does it make?
You know I tried dead hard to keep away, I just had to call again
Where did you go last night?
Oh, what's that new place like?
Okay, I won't ask any more questions
Then you can’t tell me lies

Well, they always need good men
They're crying out for them
It's not the sort of job I'd do myself, but then I'm not him
Oh, he buys you pretty things
And what does your mother think?
I just can't bear to imagine you sharing a bed with him

Tell me why should I be upset?
Some kid I've never met
We better sort this out before I go and say something I'll regret
No, I'm sure it suits him
I'm not trying to be anything
Before I leave I want you to give my love to Kevin



A throwaway title? A throwaway closing line? With other writers, it might be; but the request to give my love to Kevin is at the centre of the song. For a start, you only give your regards – let alone your love – to people you’ve already met. Our protagonist is being too friendly. And the reason is clear – he’s held in the self-conscious double bind of the ex-boyfriend (or ex-girlfriend, but to stick with the text) watching his replacement. He tries to be indifferent – ‘Why should I want to know his name? / What difference does it make?’; ‘…why should I be upset? / Some kid I've never met’ – but, as we know from observing people we know, the careless shrug is a pretence. After all, calling the guy ‘some kid’ is an attempt to belittle him. If her new man is just a ‘kid’, then the speaker can assert his superiority – which he needs psychologically. So he must be ‘upset’: otherwise he’d say, ‘someone I’ve never met’.

Equally, we can’t ignore the centrality of the word ‘Kevin’ in a song that begins ‘Why should I want to know his name?’ and then can’t forget it. Kevin’s ghost lurks in about half the end-words (‘again’, ‘them’, even ‘questions’), and it is partly the silliness of the name that makes it stand out. It might well be what the woman protests ‘suits him’. The first song on the album (George Best) is called ‘Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft’. This track appears to be related, and could have been called ‘He’s Got a Daft Name’. (There’s Kevin Rowland, of course, and Kevin Spacey; but they needed enormous talent to rise above the Federlines and Keegans and Costners, who have a definite cartoonish pathos.)

The other point is that the speaker has no idea what Kevin is like, apart from the guy’s name. The ‘difference’ it can make is the same as the difference made by knowing what his job is. It’s going into a mental image which can then be hated. This is a competition, for sure. You need to hear the song to feel Gedge’s intonation – always strangled, he makes a good effort at graciousness on ‘Well, they always need good men / They’re crying out for them’, but finally lets it slip with ‘…but then I’m not him’. There’s a stalkerish intensity to the speaker: the flurry of questions, some quite personal (‘what does your mother think?); the gratuitous meanness (‘I won’t ask any more questions…[slight pause]…then you can’t tell me lies); the self-centredness. (‘I just can’t bear to imagine you sharing a bed with him.’)

It might be stretching an already pretty elastic point to make explicit what seems implicit in the apparently conversational platitudes. ‘Give my love to Kevin’ suggests ‘All the love I gave to you, just give it to Kevin’, or ‘The love that I could once count on, just give it to Kevin’. ‘What’s that new place like?’ is only innocent if you don’t substitute ‘life’ or ‘man’ for ‘place’. The speaker is outside the woman's life, for the first time he can remember; he even suspects she is lying to him, so he really is totally excluded.

But he’s wistful too. If she was still in his life he’d have been to ‘that new place’, rather than wasting his time ‘trying dead hard to keep away’. That reminds us that he’s not just competing with Kevin – the ‘kid’ with the stupid name and the dull job – but with his ex. ‘Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft’ begins

Oh why do you catch my eye, then turn away?
I thought we said all the things we had to say
Shaun said he saw you holding hands with your new friend
How does it feel to know you've just won again?

This gets right to the heart of it. There is a tendency to crow in both songs, and throughout Gedge’s oeuvre. But it’s not really about going and saying something; it’s about regretting it. It’s not about having one more thing to say; it’s about the shame of being unable to ‘keep away’. It’s not about being cool, but rather about being upset. Gedge’s achievement is in portraying with total accuracy what it is to be the loser. And only through that accuracy will we find any dignity, since, as someone once said, I am human, therefore nothing human is strange to me.

So if Morrissey’s so intelligent,

how come he consistently fails to say anything original, interesting or unexpected? The arrogance isn't worth complaining about; but all his public statements are utterly, inflexibly banal; or they're just crazy. ('Animals look to humans for protection, and of course humans lead them into slaughterhouses, which to me is just like an image of leading children into a slaughterhouse. There’s no difference.') Please, can those of us who weren't oversensitive in the 80s get used to ignoring him?

Have you forgotten: The 97-98 season

Today Arsenal dropped out of the title race. I felt a little sorry for them because this season has been the first time in ages that I haven't hated Arsene Wenger's cheating whingers. Maybe ten years, in fact, of backing anyone - Barcelona, Liverpool, even Man Utd - who looked like beating the Arsenal.

But this is another memory: being driven round to my best friend's house, on 14 March 1998 (I now discover), after the early kick-off had seen his team, Arsenal, win at Old Trafford with a Marc Overmars goal. I was pretty gracious about it: pleased for him and for, well, any side who looked like beating United. That left Arsenal six points behind, with three games in hand, which we worked out fairly quickly was game over. We weren't wrong.

That was a great season, and it was dominated by one of the Europeans who have made the Premier League so thrilling: Dennis Bergkamp. One moment in particular: a goal against Newcastle featuring a piece of skill which is my generation's equivalent of the Cruyff turn or the Pele dummy - except far less revolutionary or iconic, since no-one has repeated it. Its total uniqueness might make this the best goal ever, because every passing move, solo dribble or long shot is essentially the same. Anyway the move is so complex it can't really be explained, so just take a look.

Get it sorted, The Indelicates

The Indelicates have been hailed as a refreshingly intellectual band – and you suspect the reviews of their looming debut album American Demo will repeat many of the compliments thrown their way. Indeed, Simon Clayton’s lyrics are ambitious and frequently clever; but just as often he sings a kind of intelligent-sounding nonsense. No-one is prepared to point this out, but if the band are going to really impress they need to rein in Clayton’s indulgences. Here are some examples:

‘Over a decade since Bill Hicks died, / You’d think some of that would have sunk in: / All this shit about England, / when England’s an island your parents just fucked in.’

Really? My parents were fucking just now? Or do you mean, rather, that this is their sole achievement in their time in England? That’s a bit of a slur on two people who’ve held down jobs, raised children, cracked some half-decent jokes. I suspect Clayton wants to say ‘England’s just an island your parents once fucked in’ – but that wouldn’t scan, so why bother making sense? (By the way, Bill Hicks wasn’t a major thinker, he was a popular entertainer.) (By the way, England isn’t an island.)

‘All the things we understand, / All the things we try: / Waiting for Pete Doherty to die.’

This song isn’t on American Demo because it caused such controversy. Apparently Clayton was trying to make a point about how some people wanted Doherty to die… In which case, how about ‘You’re waiting for Pete Doherty to die’? The problem – this is usually the problem with The Indelicates – is there are so many confused levels of irony that you don’t know who’s saying what. So immediately following these lines, we have ‘Someone come and tap this pain, I haven’t cried since Kurt Cobain’. Who’s talking here? Still the marketing men? A fan? Clayton? You can’t keep track; it’s just a series of disconnected slogans.

‘Follow a star to a new messiah, / Slit his throat for the good of the unborn. / Generations tripped the wire, / Made off with our hearts’ desire. / We've never had it so good.’

Doesn’t make any sense, and the language doesn’t offer any way of finding out what it does mean. If you actually talked to Simon Clayton, he’d be able to tell you. But that’s not a lot of help.

‘When they pin me to the wall I'll say: / I'm with America. / With godless America, I'll stand and I'll fall. / Though it cuts me to my soul…’

‘Soul’ is one of the vaguest words you can use in a piece of art. ‘Cuts me to’ implies that something cuts deep, past what would be expected: hence ‘it freezes me to the bone’. But for all I know, Sainsbury’s being out of hobnobs might ‘cut you to the soul’. The phrase has no power. It’s a lazy, lazy line which they should wince at whenever they play the song.

The Indelicates have some wonderful songs. But they need to be more careful. Too much of the band’s work sounds clever, but goes nowhere. The great contemporary songwriters, like John Darnielle and David Gedge, tell stories. They have lines that progress from one to the next. Too often, The Indelicates provide a list of meaningless aphorisms.

Why cinema is art going stale

There are several films I’d like to watch this year. A film consisting of not a single image. A film which lasts for a few seconds and is just a baby being born offscreen followed by a human inhaling. A film in which the exact same scene is repeated fourteen times. A film – only available on DVD – which, though a narrative, is supposed to be watched with the scenes in any randomly chosen order.

None of these films exists, nor will they be made in 2008. Am I being unreasonable to make such demands? After all, there are equivalents in other art forms. I’m thinking, in the examples above, of John Cage’s 4'33'', Beckett’s Breath, Ron Padgett’s 'Nothing in That Drawer', and B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates. The point is not whether these works are any good. The point is that music, plays, poems and novels accommodate experimentation and innovation as cinema does not. And this is linked to the staleness of cinema as an art form.

There Will Be Blood is the critical hit of the year, but it is noticeable how reviewers have praised its forward-thinking and unconventional style. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: ‘…thrillingly original and distinctive…a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves. Paul Thomas Anderson is doing something new with cinema, and you can hardly ask for more than that.’ Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman: ‘…the most audacious and challenging American film since The Thin Red Line’.

Does the film play any narrative tricks? Does it disorient the viewer? Does it baffle and bewilder? Does it make us question our expectations of the art form? Er, no. The real fact of the matter is it’s a glossy, well-acted, gripping story about a successful businessman who goes mental because he’s too driven to care about the people around him. A story we may possibly have come across before. The most ‘audacious’ thing about it is the dire soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood, who continues to believe, against most of the available evidence, that being weird is more impressive than writing melodies.

Again, if we glance across at other art forms, we see that artists praised as ‘thrillingly original’ tend to alienate and shock their audience, rather than picking up Oscars. Films are very unfriendly to innovation. There are, I think, two big reasons for this.

First, cinema has to be blunt. The risk of boring the viewer is so great that a movie needs to deliver a rapidly changing battery of images and impulses. Subtlety looks like inertia. Moreover, the sheer pace of the film means that most of it takes place in crude shorthand, as Virginia Woolf noted with some prescience, after seeing a film adaptation of Anna Karenina:

…we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse. None of these things has the least connexion with the novel that Tolstoy wrote.

There isn’t much time to examine a film while it happens – to examine its texture, its form, its approach. We are left with a two-dimensional object to hold, not a mirage or a shapeshifter. In cinema, surface is all you can play with – and no matter how rich the surface, it can still have the effect of obliterating subtlety. The same symbols always come up in movies. There Will Be Blood knows no way to show its protagonist’s frustration, except by having him commit several terrible crimes. We aren’t allowed to work out for ourselves that he is unhappy at heart.

So films take few risks with our perceptions. And this is their other great weakness: the stakes are too high. Films are incredibly expensive to make. The budget for an entire poem, in terms of ink and paper, could be less than 20p. The Black Keys claimed, not implausibly, that it only cost them twenty dollars to record their album Thickfreakness. But even an incredibly low-budget movie like The Blair Witch Project – an extreme example – was made at a cost of £20,000. Most films cost many times this, which means a substantial risk.

Is it any wonder that directors are hesitant to really push boundaries? If you need to recoup a quarter of a million pounds, maybe it’s best not to make a nonsensical avant-garde piece which resists all interpretation. Better – safer – to recycle the gentle clichés of plot and characterisation.

Cinema can be powerful entertainment, but then, so can a great piece of fiction. Movies don’t serve the imagination as novels do, either. They are a corrupted and limited form: art going stale. Luckily, cinema is rotting from the inside. The hysterical warnings against pirated films which now appear at the start of every feature expose a real fear. The public worked out that, as with music and poetry, you don’t have to pay if you don’t want to. Some art forms will be helped by this, but cinema is going to suffer, and that must be a good thing.

‘Elvis isn’t dead / cos I heard him on the radio’

It’s a shame to think that one day the Kooks will be represented only by the appearance of “She Moves In Her Own Way” on multiple compilations, soundtracks and nostalgic radio shows. Or maybe it will be “Naïve”, or “You Don’t Love Me”. Or plausibly “Ooh La”. Or maybe “Eddie’s Gun”. In any case, it will probably be just the one song, which everyone will download while ignoring the rest. Some kids will read that whichever song it is wasn’t really the only good Kooks track, and not entirely trust it. And so this excellent pop group will, like Dexy’s Midnight Runners (who, I should point out, are the better band), have their legacy shrunk to a four-minute highlight.

Part of the problem for the Kooks is that they come in the middle of a movement, not at the start. It kicks off with the Libertines – a fashion magazine rather than a band if ever there was one. The attempts to cash in on the Up The Bracket image have proved that schoolchildren weren’t as interested in the band’s political ranting and shameful personal habits – which is why The Others failed – as they were in a vaguely shambolic image, perfected by Razorlight, Dirty Pretty Things (who had a head start), and the Kooks. The logical conclusion to this shift is a bunch of bands who look like guitar bands, but don’t really bother pretending to be dangerous and can write tunes. These acts – Jack Peñate, the Hoosiers, Scouting For Girls – are not going to be around for long, but if we have to remember them, it should be for SFG’s “Elvis Ain’t Dead”.

William Empson said this about irony:

An irony has no point unless it is true, in some degree, in both senses; for it is imagined as part of an argument.

Empson means that, though irony involves raising an eyebrow, to take it literally is not necessarily an error. An irony which ‘has no point’ can only be taken as untrue, for example ‘apparently Prince Charles and Mohammed al Fayed get on really well’. But great writers produce ironic statements which are not simply the opposite of the truth. A couple of examples.

To tell you the real facts, most of Shakespeare’s jokes are not funny any more; but one moment which does make me laugh is a speech of Albany’s in King Lear. Albany’s wife, Goneril, has been fighting with her sister Regan over Edmund. In Regan’s favour, she has no husband; but Goneril has extracted a promise from Edmund that he will marry her, Goneril. Albany secretly knows about his wife’s adulterous intentions, and about the agreement. Late in the play, Regan announces that she will marry Edmund:

Goneril Mean you to enjoy him?
Albany The let-alone lies not in your good will.
Edmund Nor in thine, lord.
Albany Half-blooded fellow, yes.
Regan [to Edmund] Let the drum strike, and prove my title thine.
Albany Stay yet; hear reason. Edmund, I arrest thee
On capital treason; and, in thine attaint,
This gilded serpent [points to Goneril]. For your claim, fair sister,
I bar it in the interest of my wife.
'Tis she is subcontracted to this lord,
And I, her husband, contradict your banns.
If you will marry, make your loves to me;
My lady is bespoke.

Albany points out that Edmund ‘is subcontracted’ to marry Goneril – and he speaks up ‘in the interest of my wife’, defending her intentions even though they involve marrying someone else. Albany can’t resist another gibe as well, suggesting that Edmund might ‘make your loves to me’ and leave Albany’s wife alone. This is funny because Albany is obviously not acting ‘in the interest of his wife’, and is not pleased that she wants to marry another man. But he is not only being sarcastic. His marriage to Goneril has broken down, so it would hardly hurt him if she did go off with someone else. And he has even less romantic interest in his wife than he does in Edmund, so the invitation to ‘make your loves to me’ is not so ridiculous. This is what Empson means about irony working both ways. Albany’s words are neither honest nor wholly dishonest. A further example, from Larkin’s “Wild Oats”, describing a breakup:

Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt…


This, again, works in two directions. On the one hand he is joking, taking his ex’s spiteful words and then responding to them coolly: ‘Well, useful to get that learnt’. You can imagine Larkin being told ‘You’re selfish, withdrawn and easily bored’. But it is ‘an agreement’ – and this is the sincere side of Larkin’s words. He recognises that her assessment of him is in some ways accurate. And he has ‘learnt’ something. So this is a facetious statement, but also an honest admission. It is true in both senses. Now, at last, to a third example of self-deprecating irony when love goes wrong, from Scouting For Girls:

I wish it was me you chose
I wish it was me you chose
I wish it was me you chose
cos Elvis ain't dead
and you're coming back
cos Elvis ain't dead
and you're coming back
Oh no, Oh no, Oh no
You
Me
Maybe we were never meant to be
Elvis isn't dead
Elvis isn't dead
Elvis isn't dead
cos I heard him on the radio
Elvis isn't dead
Elvis isn't dead
Elvis isn't dead
and you're coming back to me I know

‘Elvis isn’t dead / cos I heard him on the radio’? Are you sure about that? This is an irony which others have pointed out: technology allows the voices of the dead to outlive them in recorded form. But the lyric is more an example of the delusion of the lovelorn narrator. It is as illogical to think that Elvis lives as to believe that ‘you’re coming back to me’. So it makes the singer look silly: like someone who is too much in love, he seizes on evidence and twists it to convince himself. It is pathetically self-serving, because it is so obviously wrong-headed.

But remember Empson: can this irony be ‘true, in some degree, in both senses’? This is where “Elvis Ain’t Dead” becomes interesting. Because the idea that ‘Elvis isn’t dead / cos I heard him on they radio’ is not new. We often say of an artist, she lives on through her work; she achieved immortality; she survives through what she wrote; we get to know her through her paintings; we still hear her voice. In this sense, Elvis really isn’t dead. He’s still audibly there.

This relates to the associated claim, that ‘you’re coming back to me’. It’s not factually true – but by stating it in a song, Scouting For Girls make it partially true. You can say what you like in a song: it’s a universe in which you are God. Elvis ain’t dead because his voice allows us to imagine his presence; likewise, through the song’s fiction, we can imagine that ‘you’re coming back to me’.

The singer’s ability to imagine the girl’s return is based on memories: ‘When I was young / I never knew / What this thing could do to you’, the song begins. This involves a casting back into time, as does hearing Elvis’s voice, recorded many years ago. And here is the neat double-meaning of ‘coming back’: returning, not just over a distance, but over time. It’s all coming back to me now. Whether or not this girl ever wants to see to Mr Scouting For Girls again, she, like Elvis, is immortalised in memory. It’s not just flippancy: it contains some truth, and this makes it an irony which Empson’s rule would approve. If SFG’s summoning of Shakespeare and Larkin is accidental poetry, it is still poetry. Which is more than you can say for Razorlight.