Hirst vs. Hughes

It's battle of the artworld heavyweights. Robert Hughes, the titanic art critic and my esteemed predecessor at Time, has weighed in on Damien Hirst. ("Absurd", "tacky commodities") And Hirst has hit back. (Hughes is a "Luddite", says Damien. "He probably cried when Queen Victoria died.")

Hughes' dismissive comments wouldn't be his first swipe at Hirst. In the introduction to his 2003 biography of Goya, Hughes refers to Hirst as "merely fashionable". But while reading Hughes' remarks today I found myself wondering how to reconcile them with something he wrote in a 2004 article for The Guardian. In the piece Hughes reflects on how the art world had changed in the 25 years since he first produced his tv series The Shock of the New, a program he updated in 2004 to survey artists who had come along since 1980. At one point Hughes describes how Hirst turned down his request to appear on camera in the new show or to allow his work to be photographed. And in the midst of that paragraph Hughes says:

I had not actually written about Hirst's work (though I consider him a much more real artist than some of the lesser geniuses of our time)

Which leaves one to wonder which are the works by Hirst that made him "real" in Hughes' estimation. You can find the complete Guardian article here.

Meanwhile, I have my own reservations about Hirst, lots of them, some of which I summarized in my profile of him in this week's Time. I'll try laying them out in more detail in a later post.