Creativity Quote by Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst’s “Artists are like everybody else” lands as both a shrug and a provocation, which is exactly the kind of double move his career is built on. Coming from an artist who turned dead sharks, diamond skulls, and pharmaceutical cabinets into global brands, it reads less like humility than like a pressure test: how much mystique does the art world need in order to keep paying attention?

The line pokes at the romantic myth of the artist as a special species - tortured, visionary, exempt from ordinary motivations. Hirst’s subtext is bluntly contemporary: artists have rent, egos, status anxiety, market incentives. They want to win. If that sounds deflating, it’s also a way of claiming honesty in a system that fetishizes “authenticity” while running on money, networking, and spectacle. By insisting artists are ordinary, Hirst ironically makes room for extraordinary outcomes: if the person is normal, then the work’s power can’t be explained away as genius-fume; it has to be accounted for in terms of strategy, timing, and cultural appetite.

Context matters: the Young British Artists era thrived on media-savvy shock and collector heat. Hirst didn’t just make objects; he engineered attention. This sentence functions like a disclaimer that doubles as a dare. If artists are like everybody else, then the art market’s priesthood looks a little silly, and the audience has less excuse to outsource judgment. It’s also self-protective: when you’re accused of being a sellout, “I’m like everybody else” becomes both alibi and critique of the game itself.