Creativity Quote by Damien Hirst

An ashtray is the kind of object you only notice when you need it, and that’s exactly why Damien Hirst elevates it: it’s brutally honest about human impulse, appetite, and aftermath. Calling it "fantastically real" is a sly reversal of how we’re trained to assign value. Museums teach us to look for aura, rarity, transcendence. The ashtray offers none of that. It’s a little plastic or glass witness to compulsion, boredom, nerves, pleasure, and the small violence of routine. It’s realism without the romance.

Hirst’s intent reads like a provocation aimed at the art world’s fetish for the pristine object. The ashtray is designed to be dirtied; its purpose is residue. That makes it a perfect emblem for Hirst’s wider project, which has always flirted with death, the body, and the commerce of spectacle. Where a skull encrusted with diamonds turns mortality into luxury, an ashtray turns luxury back into a stain. The "fantastic" part isn’t whimsy so much as the surreal fact that so much of our lived life is spent managing refuse: what we consume, what we shed, what we try to hide.

Context matters: coming out of the Young British Artists era, Hirst understood that contemporary art runs on attention as much as craft. The ashtray line functions as a pressure test. If you can see the real - the psychologically, socially, materially real - in something this unglamorous, you’re already inside his argument about what art is allowed to be, and what it’s been pretending not to be.