"Once known for trouble, even sticking a piece of chicken into the opening of his penis in a restaurant, for shock value, and getting sued for it, he has visibly mellowed."

"Despite his wild success, Mr. Hirst still sees himself as an outsider in what he calls a 'stuffy' scene in which people 'look their nose down' at him for breaking rules. Like many powerful men, he retains a deep desire to be accepted by the working class world he arose from — in his case, a postwar industrial Leeds of poverty and broken homes. Growing up without money, and then being known for it as much as the work, still stings.... 'He’s sober, which makes communication a lot more reliable,' [said the art dealer Larry Gagosian]. 'He’s healthy, he’s into yoga. He likes to tease people, but there’s not a mean bone in him....”

Not even a chicken bone?

The passage is from "Damien Hirst’s Post-Venice, Post-Truth World/The artist worked in secret on his first love, painting, for his new show. This is the anti-Venice, he says."

The new paintings are colorful dots, a sentimental tribute to Bonnard and to large sellable rectangles.



That's Bonnard. Click on this link to the Gagosian gallery to see the Hirsts. Ooh, I have a bit of a feeling that if I stared at them the right way a 3-D image would pop.



Good thing nobody gave Mr. Pitt the idea of "sticking a piece of chicken into the opening of his penis." Did Damien Hirst really do that and what piece of chicken? Thigh? Wing? You're lucky I looked it up for you. From The Guardian (2000):

Hirst's new self-awareness does not seem to have eroded his talent for bad behaviour. He reveals that he is facing legal action after he dropped his trousers in the restaurant of a Dublin hotel last month and inserted a chicken bone in the end of his penis.

Ah! So it was a bone! But a bone from what piece of the chicken? The drumstick? I'm just going to picture a delicate softly pointed rib, even though it makes me think of the death of America's oddest founding father, Gouveneur Morris:

After suffering from crippling gout throughout the fall of 1816, the Founding Father’s pain grew even worse when he began to experience a urinary tract blockage. From the don’t-try-this-at-home department, Morris then attempted to clear the obstruction by using a piece of whale bone as a catheter. The unsuccessful procedure led to further internal injuries and infection. Morris passed away on November 6, 1816, in the same room in which he was born 64 years earlier on his family’s estate, Morrisania, in what today is the South Bronx.

And that's all I'm going to say about Damien Hirst for now.