Craft Notes
Damien Hirst on Writing
“Every day your relationship with death changes.”
“You’ve got to be oblivious to other people-the push and pull of other people’s opinions, the way other people measure success. It’s then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things. And that’s very difficult because everyone wants to be better than they are. You’ve really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you’ve just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.”
“I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this.”
“Artists are like everybody else.”
“And I think, you know, I like it, so I can’t understand it, I think if you’re gonna have this stuff going in your ears, you might as well have some stuff going in your eyes.”
“I wanted a shark that’s big enough to eat you, and in a large enough amount of liquid so that you could imagine you were in there with it.”
“There’s always something you missed or something you didn’t notice or somehow you got wrong… I don’t really have a beginning.”
“Architects don’t build their own houses.”
“I always feel like the art’s there and I just see it, so it’s not really a lot of work.”
“I’m more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg’s my main influence.”
“Sometimes when you’re drunk you can see better.”
“I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they’re taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it’s a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it’s unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.”
“People say to me that my work’s sensational. And I go, “What’s wrong with sensation? It’s like touching skin.” Sensation is an element of what I do, and why not? It’s not sensational for the sake of being sensational, but it’s sensational art.”
“I don’t think I invented anything. It’s like I just saw it, just because I did it first. The road was there. It was going to happen.”
“It’s good to have a title that’s not just one word. If you’re gonna title it, you might as well try and say something.”
“There’s no possible way you can get what you want.”
“The great thing about painting now is that I’ve gotten to the point where I can forget everything just by doing it. And I never used to be able to do that.”
“I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. I’ve found out there aren’t any. I wanted to be stopped but no one will stop me.”
“I don’t mind if it falls over… if you break the glass you replace the glass, if the sheep falls out you can always get a new sheep.”
“Warhol said a brilliant thing. He said if anybody slags anything off, make more.”
Tags: damien hirst
I don’t think he got the Warhol thing quite right. What Warhol said, if I remember correctly, is that while people are sitting around deciding whether what you made is actually art, make more art. In other words, don’t wait for a critical response one way or the other. The question being asked of Andy’s work (especially in those early days) was often, “Is this really art?” So that’s what he was getting at, I believe.
Nice. I like these and Hirst.
haha, nice
i really fucking hate hirst (& all of the YBAs to be honest), but some of these are sweet
Yes, yes. You can always get a new sheep.
Well, he – or anybody – could take both trips: don’t wait for critical or somehow official reception like that’s the only fuel; and, if you get crazily hassled for something, enthusiastically consider doing more of that.
Communicating ‘nothing to say’ is clever and could be artistically successful, but I think the criticism is that some artists want to hide that fact or near-fact, and what those artists “communicate” is ‘disguise fail’.
[seems like these quotations are intriguing and all, but why is that cow sneering at kevin spacey playing ‘thinker’?]
Art-making is so much about death and nothing and “self” and not, no?
one wet puff calls for another
my favorite architects are the ones that didn’t go to school for architecture and yet build totally insane houses for women they were in love with who are no longer in their lives
my favorite architects are architects who almost never get anything actually built but design and plan and write poems for the most beautiful houses you could ever imagine
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fuck damien hirst — piece of shit art market speculator extraordinaire.
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he’s at least slightly less offensive/obnoxious than Koons, but that could just be the ubiquity of the market talking.
my favorite architects are the ones who copy the antlion & construct vast, inescapable sand pits, station themselves at the bottom, and only eat what falls in
“builder” roithamer
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Love Hirst, On the Way to Work is an inspiring book, I think…
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My favorite architect is Thor.
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“Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it.” I first heard this attributed to Keith Waldrop, but it looks like maybe it was a John Cage thing.
““You’ve got to be oblivious to other people-the push and pull of other people’s opinions, the way other people measure success. It’s then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things. And that’s very difficult because everyone wants to be better than they are. You’ve really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you’ve just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.”
-Damien Hirst
“I ain’t got time/to worry about another nigga grind/to hear what’s on another nigga mind/I just want my money”
-Young Jeezy