Saturday, October 13, 2007

Learning things from my readers




I was informed by one of my readers that the polka dot thingy was NOT a Banksy, which makes sense, but was in fact by Damien Hirst. Naturally I had to go look him up and I realized I'd seen many of his works, just not any polka dots.


*Damien Hirst (born June 7, 1965) is an English artist and the most prominent of the group that has been dubbed "Young British Artists" (or YBAs). He dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s and is internationally renowned.
Death is a central theme in his work. He is best known for his Natural History series, in which dead animals (such as a shark, a sheep or a cow) are preserved, sometimes cut-up, in formaldehyde.*
I must have blocked out his name because his stuff usually disturbs me. That's good though, right? I marked a bunch of his stuff to read up on later and try to open my mind. Shame on me for not knowing his name. But, that painting of the dots was reported to be loading into the Jolie Pitt purchases. Does that mean they're into him?

7 comments:

with love said...

That shark is creepy as all hell, where would you keep a thing like that? What if it leaked or cracked in case of an earthquake or something, what if you moved???? That would be HEAVY!!! BUT I think its cool for a museum :)

Dirty Disher said...

Id make it a coffee table. Heh.

Anonymous said...

All the formaldahyde pieces are very heavy. I have a collector friend who has a cow-piece. It weighs 2 tons. She had to repour her foundation to put it in. It also took 2 years to get permission to bring it into the country, since it is rather difficult to explain why you are importing a carcass, a tank, and formaldahyde.

Dirty Disher said...

Woah! Can you get me a pic of the piece??

Miss Tia said...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=487230&in_page_id=1773

that article says the polka dot thing IS a banksy...

Anonymous said...

I had an argument with a friend over that very shark piece not too long ago. I said that, cool as it is, it's not really *art* as much as it's kind of a...construction project of sorts. I'd still buy it and use it to scare the kiddies on Halloween if I could afford it. The rest of the year it'd be in my bathroom.

Dirty Disher said...

Yep, miss tia, I saw that, but, now I agree with the anon. That just doesn't seem Banksyish to me.

And Amy, I love when ppl fight over what is or is not art. No one ever wins.