Time & Perspective Quote by Damien Hirst

Hirst is doing something sly here: he reframes “going out” from evidence of frivolity into evidence of method. In the mythology of the serious artist, productivity is supposed to look monastic - alone in a studio, suffering visibly. Hirst counters with a more contemporary truth about how cultural power often moves: through dinners, parties, collectors, curators, assistants, and the social circuitry where taste gets minted. The line isn’t an apology; it’s a flex disguised as defensiveness.

The key phrase is “people thought.” He’s not arguing with a neutral fact, he’s pushing back against a moral reading of his lifestyle. Socialising becomes misread labor: networking as studio practice, charisma as infrastructure. “Actually done” lands with a faint sneer at the puritan fantasy that only solitary toil counts as work. It’s also a quiet admission of delegation. Hirst’s career, especially at YBA scale, is inseparable from production systems - teams, fabrication, logistics - where “getting work done” can mean directing and deciding rather than physically making.

Context matters: Hirst rose in an era when the artist became brand, entrepreneur, and media object, and when the art world’s economy rewarded visibility as much as craft. The quote defends a life lived in public as strategically productive, but it also hints at the anxiety underneath: if your labor is relational and managerial, you’re always one headline away from being called a fraud. Hirst turns that vulnerability into a thesis: the party isn’t the distraction. It’s part of the job.