"But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer's always staring me in the face. I'm already doing it"
About this Quote
Hirst’s line lands like a shrug with a scalpel behind it: the “how to live” question, usually packaged as a moral quest or self-help riddle, gets demoted to an aesthetic non-problem. The punch is in the blunt temporal shift. “How to live” points forward, toward improvement; “I’m already doing it” drags the whole fantasy back into the messy present. It’s a refusal of aspirational narrative, and it’s also a flex.
Coming from Hirst, the subtext is inseparable from his brand: the artist as entrepreneur, the studio as factory, the art world as spectacle. This isn’t a monk’s acceptance. It’s the posture of someone whose life has already been engineered into a performance of living - risk, indulgence, excess, productivity - and who knows that, in contemporary culture, authenticity is often just consistency. If you can keep doing your life at scale, you can sell it as meaning.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it punctures the bourgeois anxiety that there’s a secret manual everyone else has read. On the other, it quietly justifies whatever “it” happens to be: ambition, appetite, notoriety, even self-mythology. The line works because it’s both comforting and slippery. It invites you to stop searching, while smuggling in the idea that your current momentum is the answer - which, in an art economy obsessed with persona, is exactly the kind of ready-made philosophy that sells.
Coming from Hirst, the subtext is inseparable from his brand: the artist as entrepreneur, the studio as factory, the art world as spectacle. This isn’t a monk’s acceptance. It’s the posture of someone whose life has already been engineered into a performance of living - risk, indulgence, excess, productivity - and who knows that, in contemporary culture, authenticity is often just consistency. If you can keep doing your life at scale, you can sell it as meaning.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it punctures the bourgeois anxiety that there’s a secret manual everyone else has read. On the other, it quietly justifies whatever “it” happens to be: ambition, appetite, notoriety, even self-mythology. The line works because it’s both comforting and slippery. It invites you to stop searching, while smuggling in the idea that your current momentum is the answer - which, in an art economy obsessed with persona, is exactly the kind of ready-made philosophy that sells.
Quote Details
| Topic | Live in the Moment |
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