Word: calfing
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...excellent article on Damien Hirst and his factory "art" [Sept. 15]. More than $7o0,000 for "spin paintings" manufactured by an army of assistants? Lacayo's term "product lines on canvas" says it all. Oddly, however closely I look at the photo of Hirst's new work The Golden Calf, I can't quite see the heap of gold-plated manure beneath the pickled bull. Kevin Wooldridge, London...
...also a very witty performance. The Golden Calf is a white bullock preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that's mounted on a high marble plinth. His hooves and horns are 18-carat gold. His head is crowned by a gold Egyptian solar disk. Seen head-on, he's a false idol whose headgear is simultaneously silly and mesmerizing. (Hirst is assuming his buyers know the Bible story about worshipping a false god, just like the one they are about to worship.) But the beast is best seen in profile, the view that leaves you to reconcile as best...
...poisoned apple to the world's billionaires for $100 million. At that price level it would not only be the most expensive work by a living artist, but a punch line to Hirst's conceptualist joke about the madness of the overheated art market. Just like The Golden Calf, the diamond skull would go into the world to prove its own argument about false values...
...same, Hirst found early on an equivalent in his own work for Bacon's key motif: tortured figures writhing within a bright, clinical space. Hirst's meticulous glass tanks have some of the same feel about them, sanitary enclosures for something menacing (that shark), visceral (a bisected calf) or even putrid (that cow's head). In recent years Hirst has also begun to absorb Bacon's actual imagery into his tanks of formaldehyde. Two years ago he showed a work derived from one of the anguished triptychs Bacon made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer - with slaughtered sheep...
...Meanwhile, though he might not know it, Hirst has already produced his self-portrait. It's The Golden Calf, a king of the artworld hill, worshipped for being golden, and burdened by it too. Maybe after it's sold and gone Hirst really will be able to move on to another stage of his career...