"That's great! Love the butterflies. More butterflies. You can't have too many butterflies, that's for sure. You don't see as many butterflies in hotel rooms as you should."

That's the third-most-down-rated comment at "Artist Damien Hirst unveils the most expensive hotel suite ever at $200,000 for TWO nights...." (Daily Mail). The most up-voted comment is, "It's hideous." Yes, but that's such a flat-footed response. It really is hilariously horrible. Click for the photographs.

... Hirst's personal touch appears in nearly every aspect of the villa [i.e., the hotel suite]: from specially designed furniture and textiles that incorporate Hirst's signature spin designs, butterfly and pharmacy motifs, to large scale works of art, including a large pill cabinet filled with diamonds.

It's a place to take drugs, right? Which drugs? Maybe you can tell me. I'm just saying I can tell you don't want to be there on normal.

ADDED: The "two bull sharks suspended in formaldehyde in a white tank set into the wall of the suite" got me picturing it as a place where Donald Trump could watch television with Stormy Daniels. (Background: "Here’s the Shark Week Show Donald Trump Allegedly Watched Instead of Making a Pass at Stormy Daniels.")

"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.

More artwork that the cleaning lady threw out.

"Works made out of newspaper and cardboard, and cookie pieces scattered across the floor as part of Sala Murat's display were thrown out."

It is not the first time artwork has been accidentally thrown away by a cleaner.

In 2001, a Damien Hirst installation at London's Eyestorm Gallery consisting of a collection of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays was cleared away.

Later, in 2004, a bag of paper and cardboard by German artist Gustav Metzger was also thrown out while on a display at Tate Britain.

This is so predictable that I cannot believe that the cleaning people aren't well instructed when the artwork is at all mistakable for trash. Why wouldn't the insurance company require it? We're told the insurance company will fork over something like $14,000 for the lost cookies-n-cardboard. Saying so doesn't make it true, and if this is really a publicity stunt, we're receiving lies. But that's all I'm going to say about that, because I need to go photograph the wolf wandering in my hall right now.

Artist seems to think he invented the image of a woman with snakes for hair, accuses Damien Hirst of plagiarism for depicting Rihanna as Medusa.

"It's always fun to take a pop at Hirst, but... the charge against Hirst is not plagiarism – it is sheer artistic ordinariness."

Neither he nor [Jim] Starr have added anything original to the image of Medusa. The GQ cover is as insipid as some late Victorian mythic erotica. Compared with the great Medusas of the classical and baroque ages, Rihanna with snaky hair is just plain dull.

"Damien wants to make a statement and this statue certainly does that."

"I think it’s a wonderful idea and I’d be surprised if anyone opposed it."

Released Guantanamo detainees did not respond to art therapy the way we were hoping.

They, apparently, went on to plan the Christmas Day bombing.

1. What does this say about art? Is art ineffectual or — think about it! — quite powerful? It seems to me that serious artists are not about using art to become serene members of the community. They try to make strong statements and shake complacent conformists. Épater la bourgeoisie. Terrorist ideology + art should = explosion.* Now, of course, it was probably incredibly lame art therapy, in which case it was laughably ineffectual. I just want you to think about what a despicable use of art this was all around. Whether it was weak art or strong art, it was not something to be prescribed to turn men away from terrorism.

2. These men — Guantanamo prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari and prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi (who for some reason has now changed the Harbi to Awfi) — were released in 2007, during the Bush Administration. So, that is Bush's fault. If Obama supporters want to take advantage of the argument that it's Bush fault, they must encourage Obama to take a harsher position than Bush did against the Guantanamo detainees. Could that happen? Hardly. But maybe Obama will toughen up about the detainees. He may have wanted to do that anyway, and the Flight 253 near-disaster gives him leverage for moving his position.

***

* I hope you haven't forgotten how some artists talked about 9/11. Here's an item printed in The Guardian on September 11, 2002:

The artist Damien Hirst said last night he believed the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks "need congratulating" because they achieved "something which nobody would ever have thought possible" on an artistic level....

"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually."

Describing the image of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers as "visually stunning", he added: "You've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America.

"So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing."

Referring to how the event changed perceptions, he added: "I think our visual language has been changed by what happened on September 11: an aeroplane becomes a weapon - and if they fly close to buildings people start panicking. Our visual language is constantly changing in this way and I think as an artist you're constantly on the lookout for things like that."

AND: "Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures!" And Abdulmutallab attempted to create a "visually stunning" plane crash with his bomb-augmented penis.

"I’m totally amazed that my art is selling while banks are falling."

"I guess it means that people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks — seems like a better world today to me."

£111 million for Damien Hirst.

100 geniuses.

"The top 100 features not just brainiacs and boffins, but 19 musicians, two artists (Damien Hirst and the illustrator Robert Crumb) and one sportsman (Muhammad Ali). He is joined at number 43 by a surprise entry: Osama bin Laden."

Boffins? I don't know what the hell is going on here, but it's irking me, and why are so many of the geniuses British? Was the list compiled in Britain by any chance? In this country, when we make a thing of calling people geniuses, we give them half a million dollars.

"He couldn't remember whether it had cost 10 or 15 million pounds to make."

Remember the diamond-encrusted skull, offered for sale at $100 million? Sold.

A diamond-encrusted platinum skull by artist Damien Hirst has been sold to an investment group for the asking price of $100 million, a spokeswoman for Hirst's London gallery White Cube said on Thursday....

The spokeswoman said she could give no more details of the buyer.

"Damien Hirst has retained a participation in the work -- he still owns a share of it -- in order that he can oversee a global tour of the work that is currently being planned," she added.

I'm skeptical. About the sale, I mean. What is this "investment group"? It sounds as though it's largely composed of Hirst himself. So he got the asking price, eh? Prove it.

"Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it."

Says Damien Hirst, who seems to be laughing the hardest, as he sells a diamond-encrusted skull for $100 million.

The dazzle of the diamonds might outshine any meaning Hirst attaches to it, and that could be a problem. Its value as jewelry alone is preposterous. Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.

I found a way to laugh at death through art and commerce, and then, in the middle of the project, I saw I had connected myself to the production of death in the real world.

“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

Is something wrong with the contents of this man's skull? How do you explain that last sentence?! He has the decency to ask "What have I done?" but what should be the answer to the question -- it begins with "because" -- completely changes the subject to the collector's problem of securing the ultra-expensive object from theft.

Who drank that £42,500 bottle of water?

That bottle of melted ice from the Antarctic was on a damned plinth so it was pretty obvious it was art!

UPDATE (Backdate?): One of the commenters was reminded of something that had crossed my mind too: that time a janitor threw out a trash bag that was actually part of an art exhibit:

A bag of rubbish that was part of a Tate Britain work of art has been accidentally thrown away by a cleaner.

The bag filled with discarded paper and cardboard was part of a work by Gustav Metzger, said to demonstrate the "finite existence" of art....

The bag was part of Metzger's Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, a copy of a piece he produced in 1960...

Metzger, a German artist who lives in east London, invented "auto-destructive" art in 1959.

The work also features an "acid painting" - nylon covered in acid which slowly destroys it to illustrate the transient nature of paintings, sculptures and other artworks....

It is not the first time such a mistake has been made. In 2001 a cleaner at a London's Eyestorm Gallery gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst, having mistaken it for a pile of rubbish.

The collection of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays was said to represent the chaos of an artist's studio.

And in the 1980s the work of Joseph Beuys, which featured a very dirty bath, was scrubbed clean by a gallery worker in Germany.

I can't help suspecting that these are, if not deliberate publicity stunts, hoped for or welcomed opportunities for press coverage.