Damien Hirst’s art functions as pure financial value rather than cultural meaning
Evidence
“This isn’t just art that exists in the market, or is ‘about’ the market. This is art that is the market — a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value, and only secondarily have any other function or virtue.” So wrote Hari Kunzru of Damien Hirst’s work in the Guardian. I’m not interested in rehearsing here discussions of Hirst’s merit as an artist; what interests me instead is his symptomatic status as a figure who embodies capital’s penetration into all areas of culture. As Kunzru points out, Hirst’s own relationship to capital is more than close. He is a “house artist to the 1%”, and the way that value is generated out of his work — a mixture of hype and the exploitation of the poorly remunerated “assistants” who actually produce many of the pieces — is a model of how exchange value is created in late capitalism. Hirst’s notorious auction, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, took place at the very moment that Lehman Brothers was collapsing. But while the banks failed, Hirst remains a powerful brand. In fact, some of Hirst’s pieces were among the works that were auctioned when Lehman Brothers’ art collection was sold off in order to recoup something for the bank’s creditors. The way that the prices of Hirst’s pieces became not just part of the story of the works, but practically their sole interest, reminds me of nothing so much as Michael Jackson after Thriller. Yet, while Jackson was tragically maddened and destroyed by the colossal scale of his success, Hirst gives every impression of being perfectly at home at the heart of a vast capital-generating factory. … The current Hirst retrospective at the Tate should now look like a reliquary of bygone world, but it merely highlights that art and culture have yet to come to terms with the traumatic events of 2008. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1594
Categorization
- XREF: Extends the capitalist realism frame from earlier chapters (e.g. ch85, ch96); Hirst as exchange-value embodiment parallels the culture-industry arguments in the Frankfurt School material the reader knows. — connects to: Capitalist commodification displaces the aesthetic value of art — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 69; Fine art loses aesthetic value when removed from its creative location into wealth; Financialization colonizes culture through diffuse metaphors, narratives, and techniques — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 35 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Capitalist commodification displaces the aesthetic value of art
#expands(0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 69 - Fine art loses aesthetic value when removed from its creative location into wealth
#corroborates(0.82) - Financialization colonizes culture by fusing economic price with social value
#expands(0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 561 - Rise of finance capital is inseparable from the postmodern turn in culture
#expands(0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 93 - Financialization colonizes culture through diffuse metaphors, narratives, and techniques
#expands(0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 35 - Hyperreality is the totalizing implosion of commodity and culture into circulation
#expands(0.72) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 226 - Cultural works can be analyzed as deliberate reification rather than disguised class relations
#expands(0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 749 - Culture now shapes the financial economy as much as the economy shapes culture
#qualifies(0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 61 - Cultural goods derive exchange-value from production, not from any special appearance of immediacy
#contradicts(0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 444