Clearly a professionally written Website. Proofreading courtesy Yours Truly.
So Associated Press, always on the job, reports that beloved British artist Damien Hirst has a show, No Love Lost, opening at the the Wallace Collection tomorrow (Wednesday, October 14, 2009).
I'd like to set aside several things about this which make me angry. Allow me to list them in no particular order:
- AP thinks this is worth reporting on, apparently, because Hirst is actually painting this work, all by himself, without his mom's help, in actual oil paints. This is not actually amazing, since almost anyone can put paint on canvas. It's not that hard.
- Hirst's art openings apparently warrant Associated Press coverage. Because nothing else all that important was happening today anyway.
- Hirst actually says about his record-breaking Sotheby's auction last year, "We were very lucky with that auction. I think it's a lot more to do with luck than skill." If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of wanking.
- "Hirst says he ignores reviews. 'The biggest effort I make is not to get excited by the good ones. Then you can ignore the bad ones.'" Damien, a word, if you'd be so kind: Stop ignoring the bad reviews. They're correct. You suck. Go away.
Now that I've got them out there, let's set them aside. Sigh. I feel better, don't you? Indeedy do. A great weight has been lifted. And now I can freely visit the Wallace Collection Website and see what they have to say about their big upcoming show. The Wallace Collection is, as its site will tell you, "An International Treasure House". So let's see what they've got up about Damien Hirst and his wonderful show of....
Good lord! Was someone paid to write this page? Errors and all? This is a professional writer?
Spent all the money on the silk wall linings for Damien's masterpieces and left nothing to hire someone who could actually use proper English punctuation in the course of cranking out a whopping 150 words in a row.
So much for the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible.
These paintings are "deeply connected to the past". The paintings will "engage in a dramatic visual dialogue" with Old Master paintings.
Thank goodness Hirst has taken his work in a bold new direction and returned to the solitary practice of painting. Of course when Hirst sits alone and paints it is bold and not conservative or whatever else the art world usually labels such a practice. I guess he will manage to have his cake and eat it, once again.
When will art speak die?
So the marketing strategy Hirst is employing, never mind the work itself, is to connect his new paintings to Old Master paintings through the language of the press release and the physical location of the exhibition. Hirst's marketing strategy might succeed, he might manage to connect his work to the Old Master work hanging beside it in the only way he is concerned about, monetary value.
There's nothing more that needs to be said about Hirst, except perhaps the excruciatingly obvious, for the sake of a kind of catharsis (like farting): he is beneath contempt. The Wallace Collection, which I have visited, is another matter, and I am deeply disappointed by such sad and unbecoming debasement. It's almost as bad as having this abominable tripe shown at the Frick. But maybe the British are all closet whores. Sigh. And no, I'm not bitter; I'm merely nauseous.
It's like Richard Prince at Tate Modern. These places should just put a sign out front reading "HALL FOR HIRE". Maybe a smaller one reading, "Blowjobs in back".
Anyway, I didn't write this to protest the whoring out of museums and so forth, although that's bad, and I didn't write this to protest Hirst and his generally awful work, although that's bad, too. I wrote this to protest the lousy state of supposedly professional writing as evidenced by that pathetic attempt at English composition on the Wallace Collection page.
I mean, I understand the Internet is just the largest collection of typos and grammatical errors ever assembled, a sort of Library of Alexandria of illiteracy. But to see this shambles on a museum site, well, that's a bridge of a different color.
You would think the frigging curator would read the thing over before it got posted. Maybe he/she did. Why would any writers of talent write about art anyway? There is no money to be made doing it. I guess museums don't keep any proofreaders on staff. I would also think there are more than enough PhD holders on the museum staff to ensure that all documents they release to the public would be grammatically correct.
You don't need writers of talent, you just need writers of ENGLISH. The museum's in ENGLAND for fuck's sake. Hell, Indians know written English better than that.
That's what bugs me: This is a MUSEUM. The people who work there are supposed to know stuff. They're supposed to be educated and everything. They're supposed to be educating US.
Also, people always pick on the sorry state of education in America. But apparently things are just as bad in London. I mean, okay, it's only Manchester. But still.
(Manchester Square, that is.)
Again, it's not really Hirst who's at fault here. He is what he is, and he's going to keep playing his game as long as it keeps paying off. It's beyond useless to expect otherwise, either from him or anybody else in a comparable situation. If shit pays, you'd better believe shit is gonna happen. It's the Wallace Collection people who are exercising appalling judgment, or lack thereof. I mean, do they really need to resort to this sort of stunt? Or does everybody feel compelled to be "with-it"? Besides, Hirst is not exactly fresh meat, not by a long shot, so the whole business is not only atrocious but lame.
Unless, of course, the idea is that Hirst is already canonical, if not canonized, so he belongs with certified Old Masters. Never mind his stuff is bogus, not to mention embarrassing, however cheeky. Maybe that's it: a Monty Python scenario.
Paintings "deeply connected to the past." Indeed. No doubt P.T. Barnum would understand.
Bro I totally agree and shit. But I think it is more like a retread of Koons at Versailles - sort of decadence meets decadence in a decadencefest, thus proving their mutual decadence to all who were blind to decadence before - meaning those who think guilding everything is poetry. Damien already did that, so now he is going the other route - which is to make work that looks like art - stealing fromm a bunch of name eighties artists, using a dark (easy) gorund for dramatic effect and generally eschewing any semblance of nuanced color, paint handling or refined "technique" - I dont blame him - tat stuff is hard work. It is much easier to make accomplished looking posters int he style of than to experiment - soemthing that has never been Damien's MO - he just thinks of an idea and makes it. Woopdewhip.
As a financial genius he has help, so I don't think I can credit him there either, as he said, he was lucky - but the luck came a long time ago when he teamed up with Satchi and his financial wizz to form one of the biggest self congratulatory cluster-fucks England ever saw outside of the Tudors. And it isn't even that decadent.
Hail mary!
You know, this is like some elderly matron who decides she'll dress up like Madonna ca. Like a Virgin in order to look, uh, relevant. It is very, VERY sad, not to say pathetic.