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.