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Article translated by Amritee Mahabir
Damien Hirst belongs to a rather heterogeneous group of young English artists, theYoung British Artist (YBA), achieving international fame thanks to Charles Saatchi’s genius patronage. The multimillionaire is familiar with publicity and has a passion for contemporary art, who bought their works en masse and began to export them and commercialise them in a vast operation that was decidedly economic as often happens in today’s art market. Damien Hirst immediately stood out within the YBA for his exceptional organisational and self-promotional abilities that brought him throughout fifteen years of work to the highest point of artistic fame thanks to his practiced skills in relating to the most influential people like Norman Rosenthal. Also, gallerists like Nicholas Serota and private collectors, but above all thanks to his great rebellious and debunking spirit, and his shocking works that made an exceptional emotional impact: Hirst, in fact had always known that in order to become famous he would essentially need to be recognised, for better or worse, he needed to produce an unforgettable emotion, he needed to be unique.
It is useless to loose ourselves in a superficial rhetoric; Damien Hirst doesn’t need pointless presentations because as usual the Bad-boy of English art always manages to create a furore. Ironic and attentive to the market, it is common for Hirst to shock his own public and he always manages to do so with various episodes. After the charity auction in which he was the leading artist together with Bono Vox and following the act of generosity in which Hirst donated four works to the Tate Modern from his personal collection, the director of the Tate Nicholas Serota, had time ago lamented the museum’s difficulty to acquire works adding other news: Japanese customs blocked a Hirst masterpiece. Mother and Child Divided, a work already exhibited in different countries was held by Japanese customs at a different time. Agents, thinking that the meat was destined to be eaten, wanted to apply regulations to destroy the mean that came from abroad, in particular from the United Kingdom. Mother and Child Divided is a shocking work, a cow and a calf each sliced in half immersed in formaldehyde, clearly seen through a glass container.
Hirst was a Turner prize winner in 1995, and showcased many times at the Tate in London (where a copy donated by Hirst lies), he was also presented at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and at the Palazzo Grazzi, during the show “Where we are going?”.
The director of the Mori Art Museum, Fumio Nanjo, did his best to convince the customs officials. He tried to explain to them that the cow and the calf were not simply to be considered as beef belonging to England, and therefore to block it in customs was still enforcing a block on imports after the world case of the so-called mad cow disease. Because the same customs had instead blocked Mother and Child, Divided on its way to Tokyo for a show dedicated to the Turner Prize. The controversy and all its case controls however had fatal results for the delicate work since the carcasses had begun to decompose. It seems that the museum will exhibit a new version.
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