Creativity Quote by Damien Hirst

Hirst’s ashtray isn’t a humble object so much as a trapdoor into his whole brand of calculated morbidity. When he says you’re “always looking for artistic decisions,” he’s admitting the game: contemporary art trains viewers to hunt for intention the way detectives hunt for motive. An ashtray is “perfect” because it’s already dense with choices and residue. Someone bought it, placed it, used it, left it. It’s a designed thing that becomes a lived thing, then a discarded thing. That arc is basically a miniature career of a human body.

“Life and death” lands because it’s both literal and shamelessly theatrical. The ashtray holds the evidence of breath and habit: the cigarette as a small, repeated act of living, the ash as a soft, gray reminder that combustion is the point. In Hirst’s universe, death isn’t an interruption; it’s the material. His most famous works (sharks in formaldehyde, jewel-encrusted skulls, pharmacy vitrines) don’t just depict mortality, they stage it with retail polish. The ashtray does something sneakier: it smuggles that same existential payload into a banal, domestic prop.

Subtext: he’s defending spectacle by grounding it in the everyday. If an ashtray can carry the whole drama of being alive, then so can a tanked shark or a skull priced like a luxury condo. He’s also teasing the audience’s complicity: you want “artistic decisions”? Fine. Here’s an object that shows every decision has a cost, and it’s all sitting there in the dust.