Hirst art heist

20Jun07

According to an article in the Sunday Times (17th June 2007 by Maurice Chittenden), Sir Trevor Nunn bought a painting he thought was a genuine Damien Hirst for £27,000. The “painting” was called “Squirly Hoops Touch My Nuts Peace and Love” and was in fact a “spin painting” done by Hirst’s two-year-old son, Connor, and Keith Allen’s son Alfie, aged 10. Nunn subsequently sold the “painting” for £45,000.

This begs a number of questions. Why did Nunn buy it in the first place? Did he buy it because he liked it? In which case why did he sell it? Did he like it initially and then go off it? Or did he buy it as an investment? If the latter, what does this say about the art market…? Is art no more than stocks and shares – with no intrinsic value – just bought and sold in the hope of making a profit?

Another question: in what sense was it a Hirst painting? What gave him (or his agent) the right to put his name to it? Why was the painting not sold as having being done by Hirst’s and Allen’s sons? And if it was, would it have fetched the same price…?

It seems that it does not matter what the work is like or who actually did it – only that it is thought be have been done by a famous artist, or somehow orchestrated by them.
I think we have to draw a line about who did a piece of art and therefore whose name should go on it. Suppose we were not talking about a piece of “art”, but consider instead that this were a piece of music. Let us consider a recording of some random piano “playing” by Mozart’s two-year-old son. The question is not would it be worth anything – because there are people who would probably be interested in anything to do with the great man (a truly great man). The more interesting question is: could the piano “sounds” be passed off as a work music produced by Mozart? ANother way of putting this question is: would the piano “sounds” have any musical merit? The answer in both cases is certainly not, because, firstly, Mozart simply would not put his name to anything he hadn’t finished and was not proud to proud to put his name to – his was a genius and had the highest standards. Secondly, in music there is probably unwritten but fairly universally accepted standards – and, quite simply, random sounds do not constitute music.

For a piece of “art” to be indistinguishable from having been done by a “world famous artist” and what is in effect a couple of random young children – says a lot about the quality of the work being produced by the “artist” – i.e. utter rubbish, purely random and mechanical, and with no artistic merit at all. You certainly would not mistake the work of a two-year-old child for a completed work of Dali, Ingres, Hans Holbein, or Pieter Bruegel…

In philosophy it is very hard to categorically know something for certain or to be sure you are right, however a very useful technique generally used is to appear to the reader’s general intellect and show that the opposite of your proposition is absurd – and therefore extremely unlikely to be false – reductio ad absurdum (Latin for reduction to the absurd).

I wish to attack two commonly held beliefs in art today. The first is the claim that anything an artist claims is art – is art. The second is that anything an artist gets anyone else to make for them is art.

Anything an artist claims is art – is art – was thought up by Duchamp in 1917 (Fountain).
Anything an artist gets anyone else to make for them is art. This is a fairly common practice today and the most infamous exponents of it are Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Hirst’s spin painting with butterflies – where the butterflies are ethically sourced. I find this term very peculiar indeed. Killing butterflies, or any other living creature for that matter, is a tragedy. Period. Doing it just to make money should be met with a jail sentence. The only ethically sourced butterflies are those painted or photographed – where no butterfly is harmed or distressed. Hirst is thought to be the biggest importer of butterflies in Europe. The sooner he stops this cruel inhumane nonsense the better. I hope for his sake that reincarnation and karma…

To be continued…

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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
June 2007

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