Esthetic Masturbation: Our Era of Airhead Art

Damien Hirst is back—with a new masturbpiece. A platinum copy of a human skull (“research” suggests it derived from a thirty year old Victorian Englishman) “adorned” so to speak with 8,601 perfect diamonds, one a 52.5 carat gasper! The Bond Street jewelers, Bentley and Skinner, suppliers of diamonds to royalty since Queen Victoria’s Day say these roiling stones alone cost 12 million pounds, overall price 50 millions. It’s said to be the biggest diamond commission since the crown jewels and contained three times as many diamonds as the imperial state crown. For the love of God, what is dear Damien driving at with such largesse.

Couldn’t be that each following stunt raises the attention minimum. Hirst’s business manager, Frank Dunphy, frets that they’re letting it go too cheap. (Hirst promises no further editions.) “For the Love of God” turned out nice, Damien believes. He had been worried that it might have brought to mind an Ali G ring.( Is that the way they really do things in Kazakstan?) Alas, a photographer who had just been banned from shooting the masturbpiece, was heard to exclaim, “It’s a disco ball, innit? A 50 million pound disco ball.” (Maev Kennedy, “Diamonds are a skull’s best friend,” The Guardian, 2 June 2007.)

The masturbpiece is displayed, or deployed, in a pitch black room with narrow spotlight beams focussed on the dazzling gems. A five minute gawk for timed groups of ten is allowed, ten minutes for an interview with the artist. Previewers tended to stumble over each other! Ms. Kennedy speculates that might come from the thousands of flies clotted on a Hirst canvas hanging opposite the elevator. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, was allowed an untimed preview visit, and though he has no dough for it, he aspires to borrow it some day. The rest of Hirst’s exhibition--more cows, more fish, more butterflies, plus a formaldehyded shark, sliced lengthways this time--was no distraction.

Finally, the Artist seemed delighted by his Creation. He has the original skull back on his mantel, with gold copies of the almost perfect teeth (only one missing!). “To me,” he concludes, "it seems gentle, quite soft. I would hope that anyone looking at it would get a bit of hope, and be uplifted. We need to line the world with beautiful things that give you hope.” Heh, he’s no numbed skull, this philanthropic show off.

Meanwhile, back in Philly, at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art, masturbation continues apace. Karen Kilimnik has finally achieved the retrospective that her strange, still difficult achievement deserves, “Karen Kilimnik: Finding meaning in scatteredness,” International Herald Tribune, 1 June 2007.) "For one thing, her show. . . is appropriately strange itself, beginning with a barren, seemingly empty, party’s-over gallery. It goes deep into her woman-child imagination, touching an all too American sense of emptiness. It also makes her efforts at installation art, which encompass materials as various as glitter, fake snow and blood, stuffed animals, ballet shoes and piles of party drugs, feel of a piece with her painting, photography, video and drawing.” Ah yes, the newest genre: yard sale art. Deep, deep.

“The show tours a scrapbook’s worth of the heroes, stars, victims and star-victims—both real and imagined, and from stage, screen, fashion magazine and tabloid—that are Kilimnik’s obsessions (and often ours too.)” Heh, speak for yourself Ms. Smith, not for your readers, or even the current befuddled generation. Why is it that today’s art criticism trying to grapple with metaphysical emptiness sounds like a failed term paper in epistemology. Smith praises ICA as “among the most adventuresome showcases in the country where art since 1970 is concerned.” “It chooses its subject well, keeps things accessible through the judicious use of well-written labels and brochures, and takes risks that prove that the curatorial discipline is alive and kicking.” But not necessarily thinking!

Smith describes Ms. Kilimnik as a 50 year old Philadelphian who has “made an international name for herself in the early 1990s with seemingly random accumulations of cheap objects and materials that functioned a bit like three-dimensional rebuses. Alternately girlish and demonic, they merged popular culture, personal fantasy, history and current, often violent events and fell under the heading of scatter art, a phenomenon whose definition and membership remains a bit blurred.” Ahem! (To my skeptical eye, completely out of focus!)

“Starting in the late 1980s, scatter art was a proving ground where early 1980s appropriation art was given a new life by infusions from early 70s Process Art. Its basic strategy of accumulations of separate images and objects—a kind of assemblage or collage, minus the glue—has had a pervasive influence on the art of the last fifteen years.” God help us. Let’s appropriate some abstract inexpressivist rhetoric and call it Scatterbrainless Art. “Kilimnik’s work offers a kind of lexicon of appropriations techniques.” With emphasis on the con, not the lexi. Smith allows that KK’S scatter pieces “can seem laughably slight on first glance, resembling failed attempts at store window dressing, make-believe,homemade stage sets by a theater-crazed child or a teeange girl’s messy room.” Heh, more masturbpieces. “Scatteredness is her art’s subject, its strength and also its weakness.”

“In its daring opening gambit the Kilimnik show telegraphs the destabilizing nature of her early work with what might be considered a curatorial scatter piece. The first empty-seeming gallery is daunting, double-height and a trifle dark.” And on and on. I’d rather go fishing than translate this gibberish. And I hate fishing.

Meanwhile, one more monitor of this nonsense is lost. Professor James Beck of Columbia University died last month. Here was a mensch. He attracted international attention for his savage criticism of so-called conservation projects, being especially critical of Nippon TV’s sponsorship of “cleaning” Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceilings. And Beck was especially upset by “scholars” who up-attributed minor paintings so they would sell for more. It was the crude beginning of the Art stock market that now disfigures the traditions of humanist art. The auction houses lead cheering fests every time some overcompensated globalization boobie raises the prices of our genuine masterpieces, not to mention more and more masturbpieces.

As Michael Savage put it in his Guardian obit (2 June 2007): “Beck’s writing calls to account the cozy relationship between art experts and the art market in “upgrading” minor works to the status of masterpieces. In doing so, he reveals the secrets of his trade; it is based not on magical intuition, but diligence. Careful scholarship, close observation, exact description this book is an inspiring object in the art-historical discipline.” Beck was unwavering in his defense of the artist: "The life works of an artist, his ouevre, should not be dependent upon the manipulation of tale spinners, academic snobs, museum fundraisers and public relations operatives.”

In calling attention to the current design exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt in Manhattan, Alice Rawsthorn deplores a world art establishment in which the designers work for only ten percent of the world’s population, leaving the other ninety percent in the purgatory of poverty and disease. We badly need a cadre of Jeffrey Sachs art critics who mock the venality and foolishness of current art institutions in the so-called developed countries. The spiritual emptiness of its medians is depressing, Damien. And you’re one of the greatest malefactors. And Karen Kilimnik would like to be. Let’s just hope for more James Becks, to restore sanity to the essential enterprise of artistic expression and enjoyment.