NY Times Editorial Snarks the Shark

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Brent Staples

It is rare for an individual artist to attract the attention of the NY Times editorial board, and it's usually because of controversies over content involving sex, religion or politics. Damien Hirst's only transgression---in some eyes, not mine---is crossing boundaries of taste and making lots of money by so doing.

In their Friday editorial, Dumping the Shark, the Times' opinion-page wonks took the occasion of the Metropolitan Museum's imminent exhibition of Hirst's shark to raise a stink about artworld excesses. They began by decrying the dead fish's "lamentable afterlife suspended in formaldehyde."

But what really exercised the board was Diamond Damien's financial success:

No artist has managed the escalation of prices for his own work quite as brilliantly as Mr. Hirst. [Don't his dealers do this?] That is the real concept in his conceptualism, which has culminated in his most recent artistic farce: a human skull encrusted in diamonds.

One wonders if the editorial board's self-declared culture experts (above)---Verlyn Klinkenborg, who also counts agriculture and environmental issues as his beats; and Brent Staples, who also covers education and racial issues---consulted with the paper's art critics before harpooning the beast.

I do agree with the opinion-page pundits on one thing, though: The skull IS the culmination of Hirst's conceptualism---the ultimate and most telling realization of his idea that we are not "such stuff as dreams are made on." We're just stuff. Hirst rubs corporeality (to which he imparts a morbidly fascinating beauty) in our face.

The diamond-studded "farce" is, for me, a powerful expression of his concept that no matter how much we may encase ourselves in the material trappings of success and self-importance, we're ultimately, underneath it all, skeletons and entrails. This may be at once the most extravagant and the most chilling vanitas ever created.

The ultimate irony would be if the new Yorick, a fellow not "of infinite jest," but of infinite wealth, became a piece of ostentatious decor for some megabucks mansion. He belongs, as Hirst himself says, in a museum.

And the shark, perhaps his most iconic work, belongs at the Met---not just on loan, but on permanent exhibition.