As Andy Warhol once famously remarked,“art is what you can get away with,”
and Damien Hirst’sFor the Love of Godmight be the perfect outing of Warhol’s wit. As one art blogger complained, this“diamond encrusted head […] speaks to little more than the amount of money it will sell for,”which distinguishes it at a time when“every male artist in the Western world seems to be fascinated by”
skull art.¹³ The platinum based, diamond-encrusted skull cast from a real eight-eenth-century skull with only the teeth eerily remaining, went on display in Lon-don with an asking price of £50 million in 2007. This made the Hirst skull the highest priced work of art by a living artist in history, a fact which the artist en-thusiastically publicized. Moreover, as with the Hirst auction, the artist and his associates unabashedly manipulated the market in makingFor the Love of God
See <http://avvakoum.livejournal.com/9136.html>.
See Panero, <http://www.newcriterion.com/articleprint.cfm/The-art-market-explained-4337>.
On: <http://www.artfagcity.com/2007/10/25/1309/>, see“Joining the Style Revolution; Skull Art is Hot.”,
88 Joyce Goggin
market, and watched carefully “as the price of international diamonds rose while Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit” (Pescovitz 2007).¹⁴ In an equally savvy move, Hirst publi-cized how he personally financedFor the Love of Godand then sold it to an un-named investment group while retaining partial ownership.¹⁵The artist’s condi-tions of sale included the stipulation that the piece tour museums around the world for two years, before coming to rest in“some corporate death lounge.”¹⁶ These also ensured that the Hirst skull would not be retired to a safe to be traded on in absentia but would go on tour with“security more synonymous with an international airport than an art gallery”.¹⁷ Thus,For the Love of Godwas able to generate considerable profits as an attraction while heightening Hirst’s “glob-al name-recognition”and his status as an icon, as well as significantly contribu-ting to the United Kingdom’s“Cool Britannia”image.
However, just what, withFor the Love of God, is the Hirst machine commu-nicating about money and art by purchasing an eighteenth-century skull and en-crusting its platinum cast with thousands of diamonds? This question has been answered by Hirst himself in various ways. For example, when the piece was ex-hibited in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Hirst chose sixteen seventeenth-cen-tury“masterpieces”containing memento mori such as skulls to be displayed with it and to communicate, in the words of the curators, “how the fear of death has been expressed aesthetically through the centuries.”¹⁸The Dutch art works selected by the artist to surroundFor the Love of Godobviously constitut-ed a significant gesture, and communicatconstitut-ed a great deal about the cultural pol-itics of aesthetics. Moreover, as Hirst was surely aware, his choices would gener-ate conscious as well as potential, unintentional meanings depending on the spectator. Politically, for example, this gesture might well be read as linking
See Thorpe, 2008, passim. For a detailed discussion of both Warhol and Hirst’s relationship with the market, and the historical development of that relationship, see Galenson, passim. See also Mark C. Taylor’s 2004: 15–43, and on the broader topic of art and the market, see, Shell 1995: 56–207.
I am grateful to Simon Lilly for directing my attention to many of the points on which my argument in this section is based.
Art News Blog, <http://www.artnewsblog.com/2007/08/damien-hirst-diamond-skull-sells.
htm>. On how banks purchase, store and trade contemporary art, see Bzdak, passim.
See O’Hagan, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/may/21/arts.artsnews>.
See Schoonus,“For the Love of Goden de keuze van Hirst uit de collectie van het Rijksmu-seum, laten zien hoe de angst voor de dood door de eeuwen heen in schoonhied wordt gevat”
(my translation) <http://www.8weekly.nl/artikel/6804/damien-hirst-for-the-love-of-god-mod erne-visie-op-de-dood.html>. See also <http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/pers/tentoonstellingen/for-the-love-of-god?lang=en>.
Death and Diamonds: Finance and Art 89
Hirst’s skull to Europe’s colonial past and to the phenomenal wealth of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Seen in this light, the diamonds that cover the platinum skull could be understood as a politically conscious commentary on contemporary colonialism along the lines of the popular Holly-wood film,Blood Diamonds.¹⁹
However, whileFor the Love of Godquite consciously engages with canonical seventeenth-century art, Hirst’s work is also said to“democratize its meaning,”
and the piece may therefore equally suggest heavy metal and bling culture while referencing the contemporary fascination with Mexican and Aztec art.²⁰ More-over, by specifically selecting an eighteenth-century skull from which to work, and later creating a cupboard full of skulls and calling itCornucopia: Enlighten-ment, Hirst is aligning his pimped-up crania with the financial revolution that also occurred in the eighteenth century and the nature of the market to which it gave rise. In this case, Hirst’s conscious choice of a skull from the eighteenth century on which to model his work self-consciously positions it as a statement on art’s relationship to the market, just as manipulating both the diamond and art markets to create the piece draws attention to the relationship between art and money. One might, therefore, also read For the Love of God as a direct and intentional link to the discourses on aesthetics to which I referred earlier that mark the juncture at which the relationship of art to money becomes a mat-ter of heated debate.
When asked why he called the diamond skullFor the Love of God, Hirst ex-plains that the name was his mother’s expression of amazement at yet another outrageous project from a son famous for preserving animals in formaldehyde and calling them art. On a more sentimental note, the artist also stated in an in-terview that the piece conveys the difficulty in having to come to terms with death, claiming perhaps factitiously that his artful skull is about“how people throw money at death,” so that it constitutes a sort of bittersweet, “money-can’t-buy-happiness”statement. ²¹ When asked in the same interview whether he is an artist or a businessman, Hirst quickly replies,“what do you think? A businessman of course,”and then explains that“since Andy Warhol, it’s okay for artists to have money”. Better still, when his interviewer suggests that suffer-ing and poverty are an artist’s inspiration, Hirst replies quite simply, “well, maybe for you.”
See <http://www.avaaz.org/en/diamonds_for_love_not_hate/?cl=360086929&v=4404>.
SeeThe Artchive, <http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hirst.html>.
See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbhH_Mjywmo>.
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