Unless you have been living in a wardrobe since Christmas 2011, you must have witnessed the media output on the latest Damien Hirst exhibitions. Hirst has persuaded gallery owner Larry Gagosian to let him show a ‘retrospective’ of his spot paintings in 11 galleries worldwide. However, only 5 of the 300 plus paintings have actually been painted by Hirst himself; the  rest have been run up by Hirst’s assistants.

Call me old-fashioned, but if I go to see a retrospective of an artists’ work, I expect the work to have been painted by the artist in question, silly I know, but there it is. Hirst should have turned these shows into a ‘spot the real painting’ contest.

In April this year the great British public are to be treated to another Hirst fest at the Tate Modern.

In this exhibition Hirst’s much contested work  ’For the Love of God’  (a diamond encrusted skull, made by the Royal jewellers Bentley Skinner) will feature, along side rotting animals.  The Veteran Art Critic Robert Hughes has been less than kind about Damien’s work, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ which features a shark pickled in formaldehyde. Hughes asserts that the work is   “a clever piece of marketing, but as a piece of art it is absurd.”   The rotting shark sold for £8m in 2004. Personally, I am with Hughes, the only value I see in much of Hirst’s work is a monetary value.  In the worst recession since the 1930s a Hirst fest seems an odd choice for the Tate to hold. It is so 1990s. It is a bit embarrassing, a time we would rather forget. It sends a shudder of memories of the ‘loads-a-money’ culture that is responsible for much of today’s misery.

Damien Hirst Spot Paintings

Memories of a time when art buyers would buy any old tat on a promise that it was an ‘investment’ and would make them even more money.

Make no mistake, this is not about art; it  is about money, loads-a-money.  Things have moved on, and many hoped we had seen the last of this kind of ‘art’ production. When the  recession is finally over I hope we see an art-world  sans ‘art’ factories and a return to artists producing all their own work.

Today, we learn that the National Trust is to open High Cross House , Dartington to the public. This is good news; it  shows that brutalist architecture is being recognised; at last. Usually, whenever modern architecture is in the news, the media will trot out their favourite library pictures of the worst examples of 1960s brutalism. We are treated to old snaps of sprawling masses of concrete such as Park Hill in Sheffield, now part owned by English Heritage.

The concrete blocks of flats were thrown up in answer to the chronic housing shortages in the 1950s; they  were housing for the masses. Post-war Governments were afraid of the masses; they worried they might start to revolt against the establishment unless something was not only done, but seen to be done. The country was bankrupt after the war years and the Government needed a quick fix cheap solution, the pre fabricated concrete blocks fitted the bill; blocks  went up quickly, problem out of the way.

Brutalism, influenced by the work of the French architect Le Corbusier, was a utopian dream, which quickly turned into a nightmare with state funded projects such as Park Hill. However, buildings such as High Cross show how brutalism could have been, the gentrified side if you will.  The media’s fondness of Park Hill style pictures leads to ‘ bad brutalism’ and ‘modern architecture’ being synonymous in the public psyche.  Banned in Nazi Germany and hated by some in the British establishment, modern architecture has had a bad press. Buildings such as High Cross show this is not the case. The clean lines, honesty and simplicity of such buildings speak for themselves. The public will now see for themselves that it is simply is wrong to associate the worst examples of brutalism with modern architecture  as a whole. Not all modern architecture  is as bad as some public figures and the media would have us believe. Consider, if you will, the gorgeous curves of the Guggenheim building in New York, or the sleek lines of its counterpart  in Bilbao, they are not exactly Park Hill.  The NY Guggenheim museum was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and opened in 1959, just a few years after the first brutalist school was built-in Norfolk UK (designed by Peter and Alison Smithson).  Sydney opera house is a fantastic piece of modern architecture, which shows it brutalist roots with an honest concrete and steel interior.

Would the world have these buildings if we all were stuck in the past and refused to accept anything new?

So what do we do?

Do we build everything in some ghastly neo Georgian/Victorian style, covering the land with twee little pseudo villages?

Do we all have to live in someone else’s Disneyfied pretence of the rural idyll?

Or do we take a stance and assert that it is the 21st century, and we should be embracing the new?Houses like High Cross show us that we should not harp on about the mistakes of brutalism; we  should build exciting new modern buildings to take this country kicking and screaming out of its past. Allow in the new and we could see some fantastic buildings in the UK.

SEE   http://www.ntsouthwest.co.uk/2012/01/national-trust-to-open-modernist-gem/    for more information

High Cross Dartington

Critics do not seem to be overjoyed by David Hockney’s latest exhibition at the RA, but as the man himself has said, it is all his own work. All the work on show was produced by the 74-year-old artist himself.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy of Arts.

The art journo’s were also falling over themselves to report  that Hockney was criticising, the once  young British artist,  Damien Hirst for outsourcing his work.

Can an artist be an artist if he is not his producing his own work ?

Defendants of Hirst  will always be quick to point to the fact the great masters had teams of other artists in their studios producing works. Surely,  if it was good enough for dear old  Leonardo it is good enough for Hirst?

NO, no. This argument makes me want to scream. Yes, the masters did have other artists in their studios, they were pupils.  The clue is in the word ‘pupil’.  If you wanted to study art in Leonardo’s day you had to become a pupil to one of the great masters. You  couldn’t just  toddle off and enrol at art college.

Yes, some work was produced by the pupils and because they attempted to copy their masters work some work has been wrongly attributed to the master not the pupil. This is a very different kettle of fish to the work of an “artist” who merely designs the work for a factory of workers to complete. Getting someone to catch a huge fish and then have someone stick it in a tank of formaldehyde is not art. There is no involvement, the hand of the artist can not be seen in the work.

Criticise Hockney’s latest landscapes all you want, but the artist is present in the work, not just his signature.