Hirst damien biography of william hill
Damien Hirst’s Shark: Nature, Capitalism and the Sublime
The sheer volume of recent writings and academic conferences on the contemporary sublime suggest the subject is very much a matter of current concern.1 But there is also a sense in which the sublime is not ever quite contemporary. To discuss the sublime now, we find ourselves inevitably tracing our way back to a historical discourse, to eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant who theorised sublimity in its ‘classic’ form, or to nineteenth-century artists such as Caspar David Friedrich or J.M.W. Turner, with whom the aesthetic of the sublime is tightly associated. In fact, the very eighteenth-century thinkers who developed the notion of the sublime in its familiar, modern form were already looking back to the ancient world and to Longinus, and thus found themselves already caught up in the untimeliness of the idea.2 The winning scheme, a row of listed industrial buildings in south London converted into a free public gallery for artist Damien Hirst, was announced at a ceremony in London last night. The gallery was consistently an outsider with punters after its place on the shortlist was announced in July. Its final odds were 5/1. A spokesman for bookmaker William Hill told the AJ: ’There was hardly a bet on the winner. It must be the biggest surprise in recent history. We can probably afford to buy a Damien Hirst with our winnings.’ It is understood the judges were torn between the shortlisted schemes, with a three-to-two split between the Caruso St John-designed gallery and Herzog & de Meuron’s Blavatnik School of Government. William Hill said it saw a late flurry of bets on the latter, leading it to cut the odds it was offering from 7/2 to 5/2. The bookmaker also admitted it would have lost money if the Blavatnik School of Government had picked up the prize. The judging panel was chaired by Zaha Hadid Architects’ Patrik Schumacher, and also included AHMM’s Paul Monaghan, Heneghan Peng co-founder Roisin Heneghan, Mike Hussey, founder of sponsor Almacantar, and artist Rachel Whiteread. In contrast, the AJ’s alternative judging panel thought that the winner should be Reiach & Hall and Michael Laird Architects’ scheme for City of Glasgow College, at odds of 9/2. Newport Street Gallery c Helene Binet 5 Colin Marrs TagsCaruso St JohnRIBA Stirling PrizeWilliam Hill Focusing on Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991 which contains a preserved shark, this paper explores the longer cultural resonance of sharks as exemplars of the natural sublime. The paper argues that the shark, in Hirst’s work and elsewhere, is a figure which intertwines an aesthetic of terrible nature with the capitalist sublime. The sheer volume of recent writings and academic conferences on the contemporary sublime suggest the subject is very much a matter of current concern.1 But there is also a sense in which the sublime is not ever quite contemporary. To discuss the sublime now, we find ourselves inevitably tracing our way back to a historical discourse, to eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant who theorised sublimity in its ‘classic’ form, or to nineteenth-century artists such as Caspar David Friedrich or J.M.W. Turner, with whom the aesthetic of the sublime is tightly associated. In fact, the very eighteenth-century thinkers who developed the notion of the sublime in its familiar, modern form were already looking back to the ancient world and to Longinus, and thus found themselves already caught up in the untimeliness of the idea.2 Such a notion of a ‘contemporary sublime’ thus seems to me to raise two closely linked questions. First: what does it mean for the sublime to be at once a matter of current concern, but also a very old idea? And second: what is the relationship between the sublime that cultural historians of the eighteenth century studied and the sublime now? Answering these questions is complicated by the peculiarly intermittent unfolding of the history the sublime, which has cycled repeatedly between being a key aesthetic or critical idea and becoming something seemingly irrelevant and outmoded, rising from its grave repeatedly, like those movie-monsters who are never quite killed off because they are alre British artist (born 1965) Damien Steven Hirst (; né Brennan; born 7 June 1965) is an English artist and art collector. He was one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended. Death is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep, and a cow) are preserved, sometimes having been dissected, in formaldehyde. The best-known of these is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a clear display case. In September 2008, Hirst made an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby's by auction and bypassing his long-standing galleries. The auction raised £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst's own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde. Since 1999, Hirst's works have been challenged and contested as plagiarised 16 times. In one instance, after his sculpture Hymn was found to be closely based on a child's toy, legal proceedings led to an out-of-court settlement. Hirst was born Damien Steven Brennan in Bristol and grew up in Leeds with his Irish mother who worked for the Citizens Advi
Such a notion of a ‘contemporary sublime’ thus seems to me to raise two closely linked questions. First: what does it mean for the sublime to be at once a matter of current concern, but also a very old idea? And second: what is the relationship between the sublime that cultural historians of the eighteenth century studied and the sublime now?
Answering these questions is complicated by the peculiarly intermittent unfolding of the history the sublime, which has cycled repeatedly between being a key aesthetic or critical idea and becoming something seemingly irrelevant and outmoded, rising from its grave repeatedly, like those movie-monsters who are never quite killed off because they are already (un)dead. This insistent repetition of the sublime – like the return of the repressed – involves us in the temporality that Freud called Nachträglichkeit (sometimes translated as ‘afterwardsness’). Entwined as it is with a temporality of return, I understand the ‘contemporary sublime’ as a matter of our culture’s haunting by the history of sublimity. In such Damien Hirst
Early life and training