Just when we thought that the one good thing about the economic crisis was that it had underlined how preposterous Damien Hirst's 2007 "For the Love of God" was, that £50 million ($78 million) diamond-incrusted platinum skull is back in London — and this time, it's with the Tate's stamp of approval.
The piece, which has yet to enter a major collection and is collectively owned by a consortium of investors including Hirst himself, will be displayed in a special viewing room in the Turbine Hall during the first two months of the artist's major retrospective at Tate Modern next year. At the museum's press conference this morning, curator Ann Gallagher declined to comment on the security aspect of the display.
The notoriously press-shy Hirst wasn't present at the event. Instead, journalists were treated to a short film of the artist talking about the sparkly cranium. "I had a big fear that it would end up like a tacky piece of jewellery," says the artist with touching frankness. But who says it hasn't?
The Damien Hirst retrospective (April 4 – September 9 of next year) is part of the London 2012 Festival, a government-backed citywide art program coinciding with the Olympic Games. Britain is celebrating the artist who pretty much singlehandedly made the country the United States's equal on the art map, ushering in Cool Britannia and all that.
With more than 70 pieces, the Tate exhibition goes back to the late '80s, the cradle of the legend. Art history needs clear-cut events to mark the start of a movement, and "Freeze," the 1988 exhibition Hirst curated in a Docklands warehouse, serves this purpose beautifully. In 1988, this history says, the Young British Artists were born.
The same year also marked the beginning of an ongoing series in Hirst's career: the spot paintings (which are about to be exhibited in all the Gagosian galleries in the world). Among the very first of these, "Edge" was painted directly on the wall, and it will be recreated for the Tate exhibition. The exhibition will also have seminal butterfly paintings, including the 1991 piece "In and Out of Love" that involved live pupae hatching in the galleries, as well as early cabinets and installations such as the 1992 "Pharmacy." There will also, of course, be a herd's worth of animals in formaldehyde solution.
"He is incredibly productive," curator Gallagher said in explaining how challenging it had been to select what would go in the show. In the end, she has opted to focus on bodies of works that can be traced back to Hirst's early days — a method that conveniently leaves out the "Blue Paintings" series, slaughtered by the critics when first shown at London's Wallace Collection in 2009. The risk, though, is in emphasizing how much Hirst has been repeating himself over the last 20 years.
Up until the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, Hirst's work felt incredibly topical, nauseously so. He borrowed Warhol and Koons's strategies without their wit, or humor, creating supersized comments on the riches flowing through the art world. British artists have a very different stance these days. Just look at the work of this year's Turner Prize nominees: different shades of deft understatements. But perhaps the Tate show is what needed to finally shove Hirst in the history box, and clear the path for others to make their mark.