Marketing thanatos: Damien hirst's heart of darkness (original) (raw)

Damien Hirst and the Commodification of Art

All of modern life is a spectacle. Much of what contemporary man experiences in Western society is a false social construct mediated by images. These mediated images create desires that can never be fulfilled; they create false needs that can never be met. “Many of our daily decisions are governed by motivations over which we have no control and of which we are quite unaware” (Berger 41). The constant specter of the mediated image creates an endless cycle of desire, consumption, and disinterest, fueling a banality in life that feeds the commodification of life. Increasingly life itself becomes a commodity and the image more important than the reality it represents.

Damien Hirst's diamond skull and the capitalist sublime.

2009

The essay analyses Damian Hirst's (in)famous artwork, /For the Love of God/ (2007), a diamond-encrusted skull. It examines the relation between the experience of the work and its staging of the material cost of its production and its sale price as unthinkable sums. The essay argues that the work functions through its evocation of such a sum as "sublime", and working through some parallels in the language used in Marx's analysis of the commodity and Kant's aesthetics, proposes that in fact capital has always been the (impossible) "sublime object" at the heart of the discourse on sublimity. The essay examines, in particular, the way that /For the Love of God/ places its viewer within a fantasy scene of globalised capitalism, and that within this, whether this is Hirst's "content" in the work or not, the occluded violence and exploitation at the heart of this (unpresentable) transnational scene of the capitalist production of value returns to haunt the work.

Symbols of Victory over Death in Art Works of Damien Hirst

The article deals with the problem of overcoming the fear of death in contemporary art. The model for analysis is the programmatic artwork of Damien Hirst, his hallmark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The author turns to the playful intertwinement of signs and symbols presented different levels of symbolic reading of the art object. The purpose of this article is to unravel the network of Hirst’s symbols and to try to understand whether the artist has reached his goal, and has created the symbol of immortality in the consciousness of the audience operating with the chain of artifacts-signs. The author comes to the conclusion that as long as the base category is the category of body aesthetics, the art isn't able to overcome the fear of physical threat of nothingness.

Violence as Art Experience

Ars Aeterna Vol.8/ No.1, 2016

The article discusses Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Only God Forgives (2013), and focuses on questions of artistic representation and reception in relation to such cinematic elements as genre film, style, mise-en-scène, graphic violence and art experience. The arguments for the analyses are supported by John Dewey’s theory of art as experience where he claims that aesthetic experience is essentially infused with emotions that provide for a unifying quality cementing diverse constituent parts of the artwork. The article also takes into consideration Refn’s standpoint on the use of violence in art. While violence is a way of externalizing emotions, as Refn claims, it may not necessarily be the real experience viewers want to entertain; however, through an art experience, which is integral and complete as Dewey asserts, they are able to perceive and detect meanings that were “scattered and weakened in the material of other experiences”.

It's a Dark Philosophy: The Weeknd's Intermedial Aestheticization of Violence

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements, 2019

This chapter addresses the audiovisual aestheticization of violence in contemporary pop music. Focusing on the Canadian artist The Weeknd, I aim to illuminate how the aestheticization of violence partakes in a broader negotiation of identity in a pop music context. Where much of the literature on the connections between music, sound, and violence focuses primarily on the role of music and sound in violent contexts, I tackle the matter of how violence is represented through audiovisual means. By resituating theories of intermediality within a critical musicological framework, I devote particular attention to the networks of meaning that are mobilized when The Weeknd’s music videos reference the formal and stylistic conventions of other media forms.

Reflections on the Aesthetics of Violence

2019

Violence has long been a factor in human life and has been widely depicted in the arts. This essay explores how the artistic and appreciative responses to violence have been practiced, understood, and valued. It emphasizes the difference between the aesthetics of distant, disinterested appreciation and the engaged appreciative experience of violence in the arts, and insists on the relevance of their behavioral and ethical implications.