Last week, British artist and symbol of all that is unholy in contemporary art Damien Hirst released two new works to benefit the UK’s NHS and Food for London campaign. The public is invited to display the works in their windows to support essential workers. Butterfly Rainbow is available as a free download from Hirst’s website and Butterfly Heart was published in the Evening Standard. The orgy of death implicit in the butterfly wings (Hirst has been criticized for the sheer volume of carcasses employed in his work) pushes against the hopeful symbols in which they are embedded, just as the wings’ textured, organic beauty fights the formal simplicity of the colored bands. There is something particularly appropriate to this moment in that cohabitation of death and hope, something that feels honest in a way so many things do not. It’s something Hirst has been trying to tell us for decades. 

When I was coming of age in the art world, it was very much en vogue to despise Damien Hirst. The 2007 sale of For the Love of God to an anonymous group of buyers for £50 million dropped jaws. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, on a three year loan to the Met, inspired the title of the popular 2008 book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses. He was an easy target for complaints on the one hand from art world insiders over the so-called commercialization of art, and on the other from outsiders utterly stumped by the fact that New York’s preeminent institution was home to a shark in a formaldehyde tank. A shark that cost $12 million dollars. 

In 2012, Hirst displayed his spot paintings at every Gagosian Gallery in the world and offered to reward any patron who made it to all 11 exhibitions with a print of their own. The Huffington Post did the math and priced the endeavor at $6,697. In the end 128 people received the complimentary prints. If Hirst was playing a joke, we, the reserve army of underpaid critics, were not at its butt. We were granted the pleasure of slyly chuckling at those 128 people who trapsed around the globe. But how ungrateful we were.

The Village Voice responded with an obituary for Hirst, memorializing him as a “tool”. At Art F City Will Brand wrote:

So I’m going to lay this down, just to clarify, so that nobody from the future gets confused: we hate this shit. Everyone hates this shit. These spots reflect nothing about how we live, see, or think, they’re just some weird meme for the impossibly rich that nobody knows how to stop.

At the time, I was with them, joining the chorus decrying Hirst’s preposterous use of assistants and cozy relationship with the global elite. I was wrong. There are some great spot paintings (the 2018 show at Gagosian Chelsea was excellent) some forgettable, some mesmerizing. I won’t take Brand to task on the spot paintings alone. But there are two things I’m sure of. First, “everybody” does not hate Damien Hirst. Far from it. Second, Hirst’s best work precisely does reflect a great deal about how we live, see and think, more so than any other artist working today. 

I confess that my change of heart came with a broader shift in my thinking about the possibilities and prospects of contemporary art. In 2012 I was still high on an undergraduate education in Bourriaud, Kaprow, and the hope that art could materially change the world. I now ask much more of art: that it embody its moment in form and content, that it confront rather than comfort and that, in the words of Theodor Adorno, it might “serve as a plenipotentiary for a better world.”

For those who ask only that art be an antidote for the poison that is the present, Hirst will always be a bogeyman. He reveals what this framework must insist upon forgetting to survive: contemporary art — gasp! — exists in capitalism. Your favorite DIY apartment gallery or performance artist are participants in the very system they so loudly despise. The difference is that Hirst is winning. 

In a 2007 interview with BBC One about For the Love of God, Hirst said: “as an artist you make work with what’s around you, and money was around me.” It’s tempting to dismiss this as a confession that all Hirst was doing was toying with vast sums. But he wasn’t — isn’t — frivolously toying. He’s making art. There’s a difference. Social media has since granted us the privilege of seeing the converse in action: celebrity influencers collecting Birkin bags and inviting us into their homes on Youtube to watch their multi-thousand dollar Gucci hauls. That’s toying around with money. What Hirst does is different. 

While many artists today position themselves as critical outsiders vis à vis capitalism, Hirst embraces the fact that he — and everyone else — lives smack dab in the middle of it. Far from being capitalism’s uncritical playboy, Hirst delivers an immanent critique. The content of For the Love of God is staggeringly obvious: it’s a memento mori, following the same tradition of paintings that wealthy patrons of the 16th and 17th centuries commissioned to remind them of the inevitability of death. But the work also contains the fact that, by virtue of its shiny form, that simple meaning is obscured. For the Love of God will never be discussed without mention of its price tag. Not even the shock of our own mortality can shake us from the knee-jerk “politics” of the 21st century. 

Hirst hasn’t caused many major stirs since those episodes in 2007 and 2012. A usual flurry of self-satisfied declarations that his work sucks (and to be honest, some of the work has sucked) has accompanied each of his openings. But two years ago something changed. Hirst took to posting on his Instagram account himself, replacing some anonymous staffer’s cool tone with first-person captions. The Damien Hirst of Instagram is hard to hate. There are videos of a paint-splattered Hirst working in the studio (see, he does make his own work) and images of his oeuvre with intimate and insightful captions that reveal an artist deeply concerned with the practice of making art. Last week he answered 98 questions from followers on Instagram Live, immediately inverting any lingering perception that he is an inaccessible and ungenerous tool of the elites. There’s none of that peacocking jargon we’ve come to expect from artist talks but rather a serious consideration of form and content that is now surprising. “It’s kind of hard to spot the universal in the world we live in today,” he remarks at one point. The fact that he’s trying speaks volumes. 

I have to wonder if Hirst made his move to Instagram out of a degree of frustration. His work isn’t as ambiguous or vacuous as it’s taken to be. It isn’t ambiguous or vacuous at all. Most of his catalog is, simply put, about death. The art world has on the whole entirely missed the point, so now he’s spelling it out for us. In the caption under a recent photo of his girlfriend, Sophie, posing with that troublesome skull Hirst writes: “One day we’re all gonna be ash!” //