Re: [Damien] Hirst/pretentiousness etc. The rich love a good boost to the superiority complex. They infiltrate the walled gardens, showering money, compliments, patronage, gallery space and promotion until finally knocking them down and building their own, just with well dressed guards and sleek looking security code pads on the walls. This way they get to feel responsible for the art's existence, minus any of the soulsearching and existential turmoil it tends to take passing through to be capable of creating objects of any real wonder. They champion it to show they're able to see what those lesser are not and love to talk at great length about why it reflects so succinctly on matters they themselves never actually have to deal with. The art world at this point is nothing but a fever dream for the emotionally empty rich and aspiring to pass money around and act out their bohemian fantasies. Hirst and all who followed figured this out a long time ago, and have been pulling the same illusion ever since. Well, maybe a shi1te public statue at a dock here and a Pollock pastiche there, but on the whole, the show has been down pat for decades.
Imho, it's detrimental to take any of it anything beyond face value, but there is an F For Fakian art to the grift. Can't abide myself, but they played those cards well. From my pov, the crucial killer blow that era pulled was stripping out the emotional (soul searching, spiritual) aspect of art, which in turn brought it closer and made it more palatable to the vapid curators, experts and wealthy consumers, allowing for a much cosier host/parasite co-existence. I feel like this had the knock on effect of lowering the value in the mainstream eye of arts more concerned with matters of the soul and being 'real' etc. Yeah yeah (guess what, you, rolling your eyes, you're one of them.)
This was asymmetrically echoed in the jazz world with the academization and conservatorization of that whole scene. As soon as those with money step in and offer their
helping hand, it all goes a bit wonky and suddenly you've got Wynton Marsalis as global ambassador and the 30 years of cosmos-bound exploration starting in the 50s with Sun Ra is nearly forgotten. The kids of the wealthy parents buying the art, now studying at the conservatory are contentedly stunted in the safer side of 50s with the hopes of hitting the stage at
Montreux one day... with the pleasant, melodic chinks of champagne flutes and rustle of haute couture in the background.
You could swap jazz with dance music and the academy for any of the big branded platforms out there
ahem boilerroom
ahem and the same play acts itself out. This sh1t doesn't lend itself to a healthy, vibrant music scene. It lends itself to a spiritually bankrupt, conservative, empty shell. Weekend at Bernie's (the entire western cultural canon mix.) Clubs stuffed to the gills with the types equivalent to those waffling it up at White Cube.
Plot twist, there's no longer any difference between the creators and the consumers. Tail swallowed.
Kinda seems as though as long as Hirst continues to pull that disgruntled 'yeah, and?' face for the rest of his life, the curtain will never be pulled back. Not by those willingly playing along at least. Nor will it on
Montreux as long as the champers keeps flowing, and nor will it for BR as long as there's a constant flux of impressionable kids too young to go to a club yet and grow up thinking that that's what it's about - they, themselves, on the screen, looking cool and their own personal experience over the music, dj or communal aspect which is what this sh1t used to be about since back when DJ CroMag picked up a few sticks and got something going on a log
Tell you what though. Hirst's eyes nowadays say it all. The furtive hesitation just under the glazed surface. Trapped. Way past the disbelief that he's gotten away with it phase at this point. Much more the 'The Horror, The Horror' zone.
