Damien Hirst

Of all the YBAs to have emerged in the early 90s, Damien Hirst is probably the best known and most successful. The shark in the tank, the dead sheep, the spot paintings, the maggots in a box, and more recently, the skull adorned with £15,000,000 worth of diamonds: these are the works that define our times.

1988's Freeze exhibition, organised by Hirst while he was studying under Richard Wentworth at Goldsmiths, got the ball rolling. Young British Artists and Sensation at Charles Saatchi's eponymous gallery firmly established Hirst at the head of the new British art world, where he has pretty much remained ever since.

Opposition to Hirst and to the YBAs in general came from three main sources: red-top rags like The Daily Mail, grumpy critics like Brian Sewell, and 'The Stuckists', an artistic movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson.

Three main lines of attack have been used against Hirst: firstly that he is simply out to shock; secondly that he doesn't really produce much of the work himself; and thirdly that putting a cow in a gallery is 'just not art'. But the greats of Renaissance art had legions of assistants to help them out: nobody seems to complain about them. And the 'just not art' issue had already been addressed by dada about 80 years previously.

Whatever one's view, there's no question that alongside Warhol, Bacon and Picasso, Hirst will be remembered as one of the most significant names in Twentieth Century art.

Click here to read Tom's review of Damien Hirst at the Wallace Collection, October 2009.

Web

• Wikipedia
• Twitter