Creativity Quote by Damien Hirst

Hirst’s line lands like a shrug aimed at the grandest human ambition. “Immortality is really desirable, I guess” performs reluctance on purpose: the “really” gestures toward sincerity, then “I guess” instantly punctures it, as if the speaker can’t quite stomach sounding earnest. That wobble is the point. Hirst’s career has been built on staging death as spectacle and commodity - sharks in formaldehyde, diamond skulls, pill cabinets arranged like altars - and the quote quietly admits what fuels the whole enterprise: the art-world workaround for mortality.

The pivot, “In terms of images, anyway,” is the cold joke and the confession. He’s not talking about spiritual afterlife or moral legacy; he’s talking about durability, reproduction, brand. Images are the currency of contemporary immortality: endlessly circulated, archived, and detached from the body that made them. Hirst treats the afterlife as a media problem with a market solution. If you can’t beat death, you can at least outlast it as a JPEG, a catalog entry, a museum label.

There’s also a sly critique of how the culture industry flatters artists with permanence while selling that permanence back to them. “Immortality” becomes less a metaphysical dream than a logistical one: what gets conserved, what gets seen, what keeps accruing value. The line works because it’s both self-aware and self-serving, a minimalist mission statement for an era where being remembered often means being reproduced.