Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Damien Hirst (born in 1965) is not simply an artist; he is a distorted mirror of our ailing times. A grotesque reflection of our collective obsessions with death, money, and immortality. Some see him as the Shakespeare of contemporary art, others as a charlatan who managed to turn animal carcasses into gold bars. The truth is more complex and unsettling.
Let’s start with his obsessive relationship with death, a macabre dance that runs through his work like a black thread. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, his 4.3-meter tiger shark floating in formaldehyde, is not merely a provocation. It is a visceral meditation on our inability to grasp our own finitude, a concept Heidegger referred to as “being-toward-death”. Where the German philosopher theorized, Hirst materializes. He forces us to face death head-on, to feel its cold breath on our necks. The shark becomes our personal memento mori, a predator frozen in eternity that reminds us of our place in the cosmic food chain.
It’s no coincidence that this work emerged in the 1990s, a time when the West began losing its last illusions of infinite progress. The end of history proclaimed by Fukuyama morphed into the beginning of a slow apocalypse. Hirst captured this zeitgeist with surgical precision. His clinically sterile medical cabinets, filled with meticulously arranged pills, are modern altars to our blind faith in science and pharmacology. Pharmacy (1992) is not just an installation; it is a dissection of our over-medicalized society, where every state of mind has its corresponding pill.
Now let’s move on to his second major obsession: the art market itself. For the Love of God, a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, is the most cynically brilliant artwork of the 21st century. By creating an object whose material value surpasses its artistic value, Hirst managed to turn the art market into an artistic medium. It’s Marcel Duchamp on capitalist steroids. Walter Benjamin spoke of the aura of art in the age of mechanical reproduction; Hirst creates works whose aura is precisely their stratospheric market value.
Critics will say it’s vulgar, that it’s gratuitous provocation. But that’s precisely the point. In a world where art has become just another asset class, where works circulate between freeports like stocks on the stock exchange, Hirst merely pushes this logic to its absurd climax. He is our Andy Warhol, but where Warhol celebrated the shiny surface of consumer capitalism, Hirst reveals its rotting innards.
His Natural History series, with its bisected animals floating in formaldehyde, can be seen as a metaphor for this dissection of the contemporary art system. Mother and Child Divided (1993), a cow and its calf split in half, is not only a reflection on death and separation. It’s also a perfect image of how the market slices and commercializes art, turning living beings into dead commodities.
And what about his Spot Paintings, canvases covered in color dots aligned with manic precision? These works, mass-produced by assistants, are the artistic equivalent of financial derivatives: abstractions of abstractions, signs referring only to other signs in an infinite spiral of speculation. It’s minimalism turned into a cash machine, conceptual art transformed into an investment product.
But be careful not to see Hirst merely as a cynical manipulator of the market. His fascination with death is genuine, almost naïve in its intensity. At sixteen, he photographed himself with corpses in a Leeds morgue. This morbid obsession fits into a long artistic tradition dating back to 17th-century vanitas. As Georges Bataille noted, there is a deep connection between death, the sacred, and unproductive expenditure. Hirst’s monumental installations are secular cathedrals dedicated to this postmodern trinity.
Take A Thousand Years (1990), a vitrine containing a decaying cow’s head and flies that are born, reproduce, and die electrocuted by an insecticide. It’s metaphysical theater à la Samuel Beckett, a brutal allegory of life’s cycle reduced to its simplest expression. But it’s also a biting critique of a society that keeps death at arm’s length while remaining fascinated by it. As Zygmunt Bauman wrote, we live in an era of “tamed death”, medicalized and sanitized. Hirst delivers it back to us in all its primal brutality.
His medicine cabinets, with their endless rows of multicolored pills, are contemporary vanitas that question our relationship with mortality. Where 17th-century Flemish painters used skulls and melted candles to remind us of life’s futility, Hirst uses drugs, our modern talismans against death. These installations are meditations on what Foucault called “indefinite medicalization”, the modern tendency to treat every aspect of life as a medical problem.
There is an impressive intellectual coherence in his work, even if it’s often masked by spectacle and scandal. His art practice can be seen as a systematic exploration of what Arthur Danto called “the transfiguration of the commonplace”—how the artistic context transforms ordinary objects into art. But Hirst takes this logic further: he doesn’t just transfigure the commonplace; he transfigures death itself.
Critics who compare him to Jeff Koons miss the point. While Koons celebrates the shiny surface of our consumer culture, Hirst reveals the rotting corpse beneath the gloss. He is closer to Joseph Beuys in his understanding of the shamanic power of art, even if his shamanism is one of late capitalism. Just as Beuys used fat and felt for their symbolic healing power, Hirst uses formaldehyde and diamonds for their power of preservation and transformation.
Look at Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, his historic Sotheby’s auction in 2008, which grossed £111 million on the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed. It was more than a sale; it was a performance art piece that anticipated the total financialization of art. As Guy Debord might have said, the spectacle has become its own product.
Hirst’s trajectory mirrors that of contemporary art itself: from punk authenticity in the derelict warehouses of East London to a global commercial empire. But even in his most commercial projects, there is always this obsession with death that gives his work a gravity his imitators have never matched.
Some will say he sold out to the market, losing his artistic soul along the way. But it is precisely by selling out that he created his most powerful works on the commodification of art. He has become the Mephistopheles of his own Faust, turning his corruption into art and his art into corruption in a perfect circle.
Damien Hirst is the greatest anthropologist-artist of our time. He doesn’t just represent our relationship to death, money, and the sacred; he embodies it to the absurd. His works are ruthless diagnoses of a civilization sick with itself, where even death has become just another commodity. And if you find that depressing, you haven’t yet realized that in Hirst’s world, even depression is a market opportunity.