Rather less than a Summa Contra Gentiles

Reflections on the naysayers and the arid in spirit prompted inter alia by an overheard reaction to Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God. “Call that art! It is just a platinum cast of a skull covered in diamonds”.


“It is just ...” No, my friend, it is far from being just anything unless, say, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony or Mozart’s Requiem are just structured noises. It is a prompt to think and to feel, and you have been found wanting.

The question of intentionality, of whether or not Hirst intended to set up a group of resonating binaries – permanence/impermanence or the precious versus the disposable –  is entirely immaterial. Perhaps the richness of the work exists only in relation to the suitable equipped viewer, but this again is a matter of little import. The tree falling in the forest makes a noise only when heard? Esse est percipi as the good Bishop Berkeley has it? Whatever its ontological status, whatever the ‘site’ of the event - whether assigned to the mental or the physical or ascribed  to some Kantian category – the damn thing still makes a noise provided the auditor has a halfway decent pair of ears.

To divagate briefly, the absurdity of the 'it is just' attitude may be likened to taking outraged positions on Jastrow's hideously fecund figure, the duck-rabbit:

This is neither just a duck nor just a rabbit; its essence lies in its ambiguity. It is both and neither. To insist on one is clearly arrant stupidy. No one denies that For the Love of God has a material substrate - indeed, the vulgar glitziness of its materials is in itself part of its power - but to insist that identifying this substrate entirely and immediately exhausts the meaning of the image rendering otiose the need to think and feel and somehow exorcising the fearful spirit of art itself is equally fatuous.

What bothers me, of course, is not the need to defend this particular work but the hostility behind the question betrayed in the ad hominem overtones: “[You] call that art”. There is surely more here at stake than a question of whether Hirst is a great artist or even of whether the entire project of modern art has any inherent worth. What is ultimately at issue, one feels, is a clash between those who are on the side of the Good, the Beautiful and the True and the life-denying naysayers.

So, should one be concerned that for some – perhaps even the mass of men – the ears of their ears have not been opened and the eyes of their eyes remain resolutely shut? Well there are the demands of pedagogical altruism to consider; no man is an island entire of itself and it is surely incumbent upon the educated to cast some light into the wasteland inhabited by so many of our benighted fellows. The spectacle of an enlightened if effete aristoi selfishly sipping the nectar denied to others is in itself at least as grotesque as the tenebrous haunts of the modern troglodyte.

It is also an issue of self preservation. The howls of the damned are getting louder; the infernal regions more expansive. The barbarians are at the gate and their encampment, the shopping mall cum amusement park, starts just beyond it. We no longer have the luxury enjoyed by Pound and Eliot of simply wrinkling our noses in refined distaste:

All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days.

In times of economic retrenchment and ‘tough choices’ with the arts coming to be regarded as inessential luxuries, we need to do far more than merely sneer at the proclamation of το καλόν in the marketplace. We need the uncompromising fierceness of Thomas Carlyle and the confident moral assertiveness of Matthew Arnold. Hirst’s skull is far more than just an incredibly expensive lump of diamond-encrusted platinum; it is an occasion for thought and, above all, a memento mori.
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Post Scriptum:

1. Amused with myself at the passionate intensity of the above diatribe. Perhaps the best weapon is satire and humour. Earnestness is stupidity sent to college, to misquote P. J. O'Rourke.
2. Thinking of emerging from one’s ivory tower, a copy of Ich und Du gripped firmly in bellicose hand. Certainly, Martin Buber seems more pertinent than, say, Augustine’s City of God (things may be bad, but surely not that bad!). In Buber’s terms what we are witnessing seems to be a widespread inability to say ‘Thou’ and the ‘it-ification’ of Western culture.
3. There is a clear irony in the fact that those who embrace Hirst’s death's head do so in affirmation of life but then death is part of and gives meaning to life.  One could cite Søren Kierkegaard here, but one prefers to think of Andrew Marvell's use of the carpe diem motif in To His Coy Mistress. 
4. It is a curious fact that outraged defences of art seem to come from the most philistine of sources.  One well recalls the ‘Do You Call That Art?’ headlines in the British tabloids directed at Ms. Emin’s bed.   The press in this country is not otherwise known as a forum for aesthetic debate.