Could his £50million fake shipwreck be the downfall of Damien?
Liz Jones gets a sinking feeling at Hirst’s ‘sea treasures’ spectacular
I’M IN a gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice, bobbing about in front of a giant statue of a horse being strangled by a serpent. There is a man in the middle of this unholy mix, about to have his head swallowed by the creature that is poised for all eternity with mouth ajar, fangs at the ready.
As a motif for what lies ahead, it has a certain resonance.
The statue, The Fate Of A Banished Man (Rearing), is guarding the entrance to the Palazzo Grassi, where today the Greatest Show On Earth – if the headlines around the world are to believed – opens to the public.
The artist responsible for the hoohah is of course Damien Hirst, the bad boy of Britart, worth an estimated £250million, who has placed his head into jaws of the art critics once more in a bid to prove he’s still the man with the Midas brush.
A decade in the making, the show is seen as a gamble on the grandest of scales to bolster his flagging reputation. The art world, like the fashion world, has notoriously fickle tastes. No one knows that better than the man who has helped house the Hirst extravaganza in his two Venice palazzos – French fashion billionaire Francois Pinault, owner of a string of luxury brands including Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen.
So I’ve been sent here to see if the Hirst reboot is more Primark than Prada.
Despite being initially banned, I manage to talk my way into the private view on Saturday afternoon (the security men are every bit as ferocious as those outside a Dior catwalk show, all walkietalkies, mahogany tans and giant sunglasses). When I leave the gallery, I am more puzzled than ever about what motivates a man to produce 189 works at a reputed personal cost of £50million and an entire decade of his time.
My overwhelming feeling is that I have just been to a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show.
It’s all very colourful, glitzy and embellished, and everyone is mwah-mwahing and clapping, but would you actually want to wear it?
The exhibition, entitled Treasures From The Wreck Of The Unbelievable, is based around a fantastical (and fictional) story.
The Unbelievable, visitors are led to believe with fake bits of video footage on tiny screens, is a vast wreck, discovered off the coast of East Africa.
A cracked hull was all that remained of a ship once owned by Cif Amotan II, a former slave who amassed a fortune. He bought treasures, and loaded them aboard the Apistos (a word that translates from the Koine Greek as ‘unbelievable’), their destination a purposebuilt temple.
The ship foundered, so Hirst’s story goes, ‘to the realm of myth and spawning myriad permutations of this story of ambition, avarice, splendour and hubris’.
The collection lay undisturbed for two millennia, before being discovered and hoisted to dry land and, subsequently, to Venice for the Biennale.
Just one problem. It’s a shipload of crock. How on earth did Kate Moss’s visage get down to the bottom of the sea, or Mickey Mouse and Pluto, or characters from Transformers – all among the supposed treasures?
It’s brilliantly accomplished (the marble shrouds have such realistic wrinkles I want to straighten them) but all rather hollow.
I once asked Tracey Emin why, if she was stuck for the odd million, she couldn’t just quickly paint something, or rustle up another carving of her cat, Docket. ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ she told me. ‘You have to have something to say.’
Her art was introspective. She mines her soul. Unlike Hirst, who mines anywhere he can dig up diamonds, emeralds, gold.
There is an 18m tall statue in one courtyard, a Buddha made from one enormous piece of jade and a silver room, which is when, for me,
For me, it all became a bit ground-floor Harrods
it all became a bit ‘ground-floor of Harrods’.
There is a marble head with two rare emeralds as its eyes (the natural flaws act as irises), and lots of skulls, which don’t bring to mind death and finality and time, as they are supposed to if the rather mixed reviews in the arts pages are to be believed. No. I kept picturing Johnny Depp in his pirate garb; all we needed was a parrot and Keira Knightley.
I’m afraid Hirst’s oeuvre is now so diluted, it resembles a glass of Ribena (children will love this exhibition, with its mix of gore and wonder and scale). But there were some highlights.
I enjoyed his fake coral pieces, embellished with worms, creepy crabs and sea creatures. The colours are so vibrant you feel you are scuba diving, but it can’t touch the real thing for beauty. I loved, too, the small, solid gold animals and a giant clam shell that looked so real I wanted to stroke it.
The idea of showing a sculpture of a woman in three stages – as a relic, after restoration, and in perfect reproduction – is clever, but reminded me of me, before and after my facelift.
My favourite of all, though, were the drawings – the crowd were speaking in Italian, but I kept hearing the name Michelangelo, over and over.
But as I moved from room to room, I was left wondering whether Hirst’s wealth has left him so isolated from reality he can only think about his bank balance (all the pieces will go into storage once the exhibition closes, after that, limited edition copies will go on sale).
My belief is that art is like a diamond or a pearl: it needs pressure and grit to make it perfect.
While there is much to admire, not least the work of hundreds and hundreds of craftsmen who have been toiling away on Hirst’s behalf (the £3.23 million Medusa kept breaking), I kept coming back to one awkward question.
Is Damien the only man on earth who hasn’t heard the phrase: ‘Size doesn’t matter’?
His oeuvre is so diluted it resembles Ribena