"Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better"
About this Quote
Damien Hirst’s line lands like a dare: what if clarity isn’t a sober virtue but a side effect of losing control? Coming from an artist whose brand is equal parts shock, commerce, and dead-eyed candor, “Sometimes when you’re drunk you can see better” isn’t romance about alcohol; it’s a theory of attention. Intoxication becomes a tool for puncturing the polite narratives we use to file reality into something manageable.
The intent is slippery on purpose. Hirst knows the audience wants a confession - the hard-living artist myth, the studio as afterparty - and he gives it to them while also undermining it. “Sometimes” is the key hedge: not an endorsement, not a moral, just a tactical admission that altered states can temporarily disable self-censorship. What you “see better” isn’t the world in higher resolution; it’s your own defenses lowering. You notice what you’ve been trained to ignore: the ugliness under taste, the anxiety under ambition, the absurdity under money.
That subtext tracks with Hirst’s work, which thrives on the friction between sincerity and spectacle: sharks in tanks, spot paintings as luxury wallpaper, mortality packaged for collectors. Drunk vision, in this sense, mirrors the gallery experience he manufactures. He courts a kind of vertigo where viewers feel both enlightened and implicated, newly “clear” about death, value, and desire - and then wonder if that clarity is just another intoxication, administered by the market instead of a bottle.
The intent is slippery on purpose. Hirst knows the audience wants a confession - the hard-living artist myth, the studio as afterparty - and he gives it to them while also undermining it. “Sometimes” is the key hedge: not an endorsement, not a moral, just a tactical admission that altered states can temporarily disable self-censorship. What you “see better” isn’t the world in higher resolution; it’s your own defenses lowering. You notice what you’ve been trained to ignore: the ugliness under taste, the anxiety under ambition, the absurdity under money.
That subtext tracks with Hirst’s work, which thrives on the friction between sincerity and spectacle: sharks in tanks, spot paintings as luxury wallpaper, mortality packaged for collectors. Drunk vision, in this sense, mirrors the gallery experience he manufactures. He courts a kind of vertigo where viewers feel both enlightened and implicated, newly “clear” about death, value, and desire - and then wonder if that clarity is just another intoxication, administered by the market instead of a bottle.
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| Topic | Deep |
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