Damien Hirst is so inspiring!!

I know the titles for posts shouldn't give in to irony in its many cynical and soul-sapping forms, but, Damien Hirst does demand it.

I’ve heard Hirst in the last few days saying, repeating, presumably in response to vague, repeated, insinuations about the contrast between the personal, immediate worth of his art and its monetary value, how he “tries” to make art for people in the future. Two hundred years’ time appears to be the destination of these remarkably accurate future-directed moments of vision + imagination + craft.

ie. When today’s benighted (sober?) plebs and their hastily-briefed journalistic representatives question one’s greatness, one’s response is to slyly discount their responses and the content of those obviously too-hasty briefings: you lot don’t know what you’re talking about; posterity will serve me better. (Having been thinking about DFW, but finding very little adequate to say about his suicide, I remember his stated intent to locate himself between writers he described as "avant-garde ... writing just for other writers" and those who produced "crass cynical commercial fiction", believing that both were driven by "contempt for their audience"…)

Even though the following idea is sort of a lá bent brilliance of Book of Dave and I suppose something to do with the straight brilliance of Wall-E, and not at all to cast the aspersions Hirsty so brilliantly provokes on his Self-ness or the Pixar lot, I wouldn’t have posted it had it not been for all this shite.

Here goes: Wouldn’t it be funny if the below (proof of a certain moment of vision + imagination + considerable craft, surely) was the one remaining vestige of our civilization, found in some form in, say, two hundred years’ time, along with the cockroaches and general air of misdirected-congratulation which will inevitably linger heavy in the earth’s atmosphere, built up over a couple of millennia of putting on monuments and in screens and considering beautiful the lives of emperors, politicians, artists who take themselves v v seriously and have never quite been told to their faces but rather given the repeated, fearful gifts of vaguely insinuating, deferential interviews, moments of congratulation for work which has no appropriateness to itself let alone its moment, did not need to be done.

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Great times, boys, interesting times.

“the transubstantiation of the faecal matter into art.”

"It's shit."
"But it's also sort of art."
"No it's literally shit is literally what it is."
('The Suffering Channel' by DFW)

Martin Herbert's Santiago Sierra iv prises apart some of the ambivalences of an artist whose art is consistently in-your-face and at the same time points to its own inefficacy as politics.

The Lisson Gallery exhibited Sierra's '21 Anthropometric Modules Made of Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, India, 2005-06' a couple of months back and the piece did exactly what it didn't quite say on the tin. The 'modules' were blocks, 3 metres by one metre each, of cast, long-dry shit. Shit that had been carried by members of New Delhi's scavenger class (caste?), from latrines to dumping areas, in return for a wage. The blocks looked like old, oversized breezeblocks, grey and crumbling. There were fifteen or so of them and they were presented in a state of semi-unpack, half in, half out of their crates. The inbetween-ness of the bocks' presentation, not fully arrived but unquestionably for show, signalled the way in which shit changes, was being changed as gallery-goers walked around it, by its context in a commercial gallery.

Some critics say it's all very well being political, but what difference does it make to the lives of the people being exploited? Others draw back, have conceded art's inefficacy, and call this sort of work an exploration of the issues. Perhaps there's something Janus-ish about Sierra in that he points outwards from his work at something political, and at the same time inwards to his chosen medium and its limitations. If this is the case, Sierra's tropes do as much as any current practitioner working in the area where politics and art may and may not cross.