A Shark among the Critics: Damien Hirst’s Economies of Reception

Rodrigues, Jeanne

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A Shark among the Critics: Damien Hirst’s Economies of Reception

Rodrigues, Jeanne

Abstract

How can the evolving contexts in which Damien Hirst's Beautiful Inside My Head Forever (2008) and Complete Spot Painting, 1986-2011 (2012) exhibitions are received be seen as dynamically interconnected with the shifts and developments in the art market? In other words, how can we quantify and evaluate the interaction of “esthetics” and economics in the variations of this artist’s reception and their market value? This thesis aims to analyze how Damien Hirst’s two best-known exhibitions, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever (2008) and Complete Spot Painting, 1986-2011 (2012), impact art markets in different cultural, economic and critical contexts. Focusing on works such as The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living, The Golden Calf, Valium and Cupric Nitrate, a comparative approach to the impact and reception of these exhibitions in New York, London, and Paris reveals crucial variations in the artist’s purported value, economic and artistic. In these different contexts, controversy about his commercial success rely on the artist’s visual and material choices, and the way these create “sensational” works. However, this occludes the ways in which Hirst’s artistic and curatorial strategies are also, and profoundly so, impacted by his work’s market value. While certain art critics do identify him as being primarily a commercial artist, art-historical scholarship is conflicted about the role commercial success plays in his artistic strategies. This historiographical divide is, at least in part, due to the intellectual and economic contexts in which art historians seem to be writing, and to whom their scholarship is addressed. Anglophone scholarship, on the whole, depicts Hirst as a genius of entrepreneurship; francophone art historians tend to focus on his post-modern conceptualism, repeatedly qualifying Hirst as a “taxidermist.” iii This thesis, therefore, begins with a close examination of the critical reception of Beautiful Inside My Head Forever and Complete Spot Painting, 1986-2011 exhibitions in order to evince the radically different debates that surround Hirst’s work especially since 2008, in New York, London and Paris. The role of exhibition venues — an auction house, a point of purchase gallery and a museum — is examined as a factor in the way in which Hirst’s recent work is presented and received. However, this thesis aims to demonstrate above all the dynamic interaction of local markets with those institutions and, especially, with the artist’s own highly informed choices in those contexts. Exhibition reviews from both specialized and popular sources, art-historical essays and monographs, artist interviews, and sale results, provide the main primary and secondary sources through which this thesis analyzes a case study of the interaction between market forces, critical reception and artistic agency.