balls

Whoever (me) thought Damien Hirst was clever in single-handedly restructuring artist-consumer relations by cutting out Mr Gallery, Tao Lin’s in on it too now .

Hirst’s straight-to-auction stunt was precipitated by two things - i) Georgian mining magnate Boris Ivanishvili buying a Peter Doig for £5.7 million (nearly five times Sotheby’s estimate for ‘White Canoe’ and at the time, early 2007, the highest price ever paid for work by a living European artist), which showed there was new money for new work ii) the success of the charity auction in part organised by Hirst, held on St. Valentine’s day 2008 in New York for RED, a third world charity, in which Hirst’s work sold for more than that of people like Howard Hodgkin, Jeff Koons, Wilem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

As it says here : ‘The moment to repeat Pharmacy [the selling off of bits and pieces, many of them entirely incidental to Hirst’s work, from the trendy restaurant which had had some of Hirst’s work in it] had come’.

: These showed that the time was right.

I don’t know enough about the publishing industry to guess what might have said to Lin that this was a good time to cut out Mr Agent - part of whose role is to give the writer an advance, which the writer then must ‘pay off’ with sales, before making any profit himself.

: I suppose that since writers have to be good at concealing stuff in their work, any time is a good time to demonstate the fact you understand the stuff outside your work - apart from anything, by creating a stakeholding (if small) public, Lin has recruited a devoted (if small) number of people who will sell sell sell his work, maybe even more assiduously than those traditionally pushing an author’s work.

And this kind of investment is totally NEW (I think...). Cue a tremor in bloggerville, and more publicity.

The publishing industry is a very different fish to that of visual arts - mainly, in this case, it seems to me, because one cannot ‘own’ a book exclusively (can you…….?) and even if you could, displayed in your mile-wide hallway, it wouldn’t wow your billionaire neighbours as effectively as a formaldehyde-encased calf with really big testicles.

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.