Has Hirst Really Damaged the Art World?

Has Damien Hirst Really Corrupted the Art World?

During the summer I like to spend a week or two by the sleepy town of Ilfracombe, North Devon. The once prosperous tourist destination declined heavily after flights became cheaper and Britons sought the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and the like. I recall visiting the town; overrun with greasy fish and chip shops, slimy characters behind money-exchange booths in amusement arcades, businesses vomiting on everyone the dated ideal of a British beach holiday; the overwhelming sense of a town past its prime, like a grotesque prostitute desperate to earn her final pound. This was five years ago. Today Ilfracombe is a writhing morass of culture and tourism and is heavily indebted to the artwork of one man: Damien Hirst.

Ever since his sculpture, Verity, was loaned there, a variety of industries have propped up and it has been hailed as a huge success. "It's had a tremendous effect," Mike Edmunds, district councillor for Ilfracombe east, has said.

Like it or not, Hirst has influenced British art in a more brutal and ruthless way anyone has ever done since the Modernists. Damien Hirst was among the forefront of British artists who created the image of Cool Britannia and the demand for our art. Along with his fame and popularity he has become a controversial figure and subject to heavy critique.

The most obvious and clichéd criticism of Hirst is that he is not an artist. Critics claim that employing other artists to help meet the high demand for his artwork reduces his ownership of the pieces. The definition of ‘art’ is of course somewhat subjective however this is one that was in the Oxford dictionary, “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” Hence the ethos which Hirst adopts is that the creative act is the conception, not the execution, and concedes with almost all standard definitions of ‘art’. Telling Walt Disney he was a fake for employing a team of animators to complete his films...