CosmiKnot

A hang over is a funny thing. I am in the dining room having eeked the last part of the maths homework out of my son and the world seems fuzzy. Not fuzzy as it did yesterday when I realised my left eye was struggling to focus (age and stress) but fuzzy in a way more suited to Sundays spent in an undergraduate bedroom. I never really let go at art college. By which I mean I was always aware that I might have to function the next day. Life was not an Alex Garland ed beach for me. There is probably a certain amount of obsessive compulsive control freakerery to blame for me never really disengaging from an approach of nervous trepidation. The old spectacles testicles wallet and watch is a joke that chimes with me on a number of levels - not least the repeated rituals that Catholicism seemed to instigate. Set off. I never forget the time my parents found me, aged 10, kissing the feet of the deconstructed crucifix that hung over our staircase. You don't need to do that they said gently...

Damien Hirst is a renaissance artist. By which I mean he is part of a defunct tradition not that he is a polymath seeker outer of the green fuse of wonderment. Leonardo was the latter. It's a cliche but his work was driven by enquiry and a desire to explore the outer limits of materials and their ability to depict. The renaissance used the order and systematic application of classical antiquity as its framework. From a classical view point the underlying form then became more and more important. This broke with a byzantine idea that the picture surface was a conduit for something beyond the surface of life. The ego discarded the unconscious. The renaissance became all about the surface. With the sense of ineffable vaporised the only escape from the surface was to go below. Anatomy abounds. Depicting death becomes the best way of making things realistic. Mantegna's Dead Christ ought to have been the last word on this matter. Instead centuries later the ecorche (a cast of a flaye...

Okay Hirst is part of the artist as lone individual genius picture. A shark savagely devouring weaker rivals. My hunch is that at Goldsmiths they train em up like pitbulls hanging from branches by their teeth. Two things created ybas. One is tutors saying explore your identity. Your obsession. You are unique. The other is the tired idea that anything can be art if the artist says so. This is duchamp as Buddha. The YBAs were not radical free thinkers like say those of arte provera. They were good students fed on steaks and steroids. Good students mimic the ideas presented by their tutors and disguise this enough to make it communicate an idea of originality without unsettling the tutor because it goes beyond the limits of their personal art cage. Damien Hirst talks about the power of juxtaposition to create something new but this is simply the talk of nineteen eighties ad men. Hirst's is a hermetically sealed world - all of it a teenage boy's over blown Vanitas. Published with...