When does an everyday object become fine art? When someone famous says it is. Andy Warhol’s depiction of Campbell’s soup cans comes to mind as the ultimate reference of a household item that is synonymous with “high art”, which is collected, sold and hung in museums.Many artists in the 20th Century have followed suit, but none so prolifically as Damien Hirst who arguably is the most famous living artists today. Just as many have argued that silkscreen prints of soup cans is not ‘art’, so too have people snickered at the often scientifically morbid fascination Hirst has with preserving dead animals.
His notoriety is not only based on his subject matter, but also that he considers himself more as a businessman than an artist. Interestingly he has refused representation by the major art houses, and has chosen to sell directly to the major auction houses instead, therefore cutting out the middleman. Few artists have the shrewd ability to sell and market their own work, let alone catapult their careers in order to fetch millions of dollars for a single work of art during their lifetime.
Most notable was the sale of a shark killed in Australia, preserved in formaldehyde and encased in glass, that sold at Sotheby’s for $100, 000, 000 pounds. Now a shark is definitely not an everyday object, but preserving a dead animal, and calling it art is a far cry from soup cans. Although Warhol and Hirst each explore very different subject matter they both had the technical know-how in creating their work, yet the question remains as to whether there is real creativity and artistic mastery present in the art they have produced?
I would argue that Hirst skirts a very fine line in creating a valuable contribution to the evolution in art (regardless of whether the art world values it as such) versus a scientific display of dead animals that people must now accept as commonplace in museums.
