I stumbled across this really interesting article on Damien Hirst, copyright and copying – what are your thoughts? Original article here, excerpt below:
stuck inn xi: the art damien hirst stole
By Charles Thomson.
In 1995, Damien Hirst defended his work with the rationale, “It’s very easy to say, ‘I could have done that,’ after someone’s done it. But I did it. You didn’t. It didn’t exist until I did it.”
In 2000, he decided that doing it was not the justification after all: “I don’t think the hand of the artist is important on any level, because you’re trying to communicate an idea.”
In 2006, the idea of the artist was not important on any level either: “Lucky for me, when I went to art school we were a generation where we didn’t have any shame about stealing other people’s ideas. You call it a tribute”.
In 2009, Anthony Haden-Guest interviewed Hirst: “Other artists have attacked you for using their ideas. John LeKay said the skulls were his idea. John Armleder … was doing spot paintings. And some say Walter Robinson did the spin paintings first.” Hirst’s tribute was: “Fuck ‘em all!”
Hirst’s career started In 1988 at the Freeze exhibition, when he painted grids of spots with random colours. Thomas Downing, an American, painted grids of spots with repeated colours in the 1960s. Gerhard Richter painted grids of rectangles with random colours in 1966. John Armleder, a Swiss artist, painted spots during the 1970s.
In 1989, Hirst starting making cabinets with bottles on shelves. In 1992, he developed this into a room-size installation, called Pharmacy. Joseph Cornell displayed a cabinet with bottles on shelves, called Pharmacy in 1943.
Read rest of article on original site… (NB, I don’t want to just copy it all here, as it was First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, September 14th, 2010….)
Related articles
- Damien Hirst to design Brit Award (bbc.co.uk)
- Works by Damien Hirst lose 30 per cent of their value, while one third fail to sell at all (telegraph.co.uk)
- In Ten Years We’ll All Agree That Damien Hirst Is A Joke (businessinsider.com)
- Damien Hirst to design next year’s Brit Award (itv.com)
- Tate 2012 (desight.wordpress.com)
- Damien Hirst’s new statue is a dangerous monstrosity (guardian.co.uk)
Pingback: Did Hirst steal these concepts – « Desight for signs & brand design London