"Artists are like everybody else"
About this Quote
The bluntness collapses the romantic myth of the artist as a rarefied genius and relocates creativity within ordinary human life. Coming from Damien Hirst, a figure who both embodies and critiques art-world celebrity, the line lands with a double charge. Hirst emerged with the Young British Artists in the 1990s, embraced spectacle and market visibility, and built studios where assistants produced spot paintings and other works according to a system. By privileging the idea over the artist’s hand, he suggested that the aura of singular authorship is often a story we tell about art rather than a necessity of making it.
Saying artists are like everybody else points to shared motives and limits. Artists want to pay bills, seek recognition, and operate within economies of desire and scarcity. Hirst has been unusually candid about money and commerce, staging a headline-grabbing auction that bypassed galleries and turned the art market into both subject and medium. That move implied that artists are not exempt from market forces; they surf them, sometimes critically, but never from outside.
The remark also resonates with his obsession with mortality. Animals in formaldehyde, medicine cabinets, and surgical tools insist that life is fragile and finite. In the face of death and the body’s givens, artists are not special beings; they are bodies among bodies. If there is a difference, it lies in attention and arrangement, not in a superior essence.
There is a democratizing edge here. If artists are like everybody else, then everybody else can participate in art’s territory of noticing, framing, and making meaning. Yet a paradox remains: Hirst’s brand depends on the spectacle of the artist as a singular figure. He does not resolve the tension; he exploits it. The statement invites viewers to drop reverence and meet the work without superstition, to see the artist as a worker among workers, and to judge the ideas and effects rather than the myth of the maker.
Saying artists are like everybody else points to shared motives and limits. Artists want to pay bills, seek recognition, and operate within economies of desire and scarcity. Hirst has been unusually candid about money and commerce, staging a headline-grabbing auction that bypassed galleries and turned the art market into both subject and medium. That move implied that artists are not exempt from market forces; they surf them, sometimes critically, but never from outside.
The remark also resonates with his obsession with mortality. Animals in formaldehyde, medicine cabinets, and surgical tools insist that life is fragile and finite. In the face of death and the body’s givens, artists are not special beings; they are bodies among bodies. If there is a difference, it lies in attention and arrangement, not in a superior essence.
There is a democratizing edge here. If artists are like everybody else, then everybody else can participate in art’s territory of noticing, framing, and making meaning. Yet a paradox remains: Hirst’s brand depends on the spectacle of the artist as a singular figure. He does not resolve the tension; he exploits it. The statement invites viewers to drop reverence and meet the work without superstition, to see the artist as a worker among workers, and to judge the ideas and effects rather than the myth of the maker.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Damien
Add to List
