Urban Art Association

Oops I did it again

The Empresses probably look better.
Is a small edition really a small edition when there's another huge batch of prints that look so similar?

It's like he's playing mind games with art collectors.

finally a Hirst edition
LOL

Yet another completely pointless release by Damien Hirst and Heni.

Seen it all before. And it's not cheap either. $6K for UK residents.

Heni-thing goes at this point.

See what I did there 😏

I like them! Will have a look at them on the weekend in soho if I can

Not nice 😬

Is he not over saturating his market with all these releases?

I like the images. Great that it is limited. Will likely apply for one.

I posted the interview in the civilization thread but he is on plan:

DH: I’m totally fucking confused, because the world’s changing so fast. It’s very difficult to make head or tail of it and to know what to do. We live in a world where I’m making more money from prints than from paintings. The changes are in my lifetime. What the fuck would Picasso do today? I’ve got no idea. It’s very difficult to make sense of it—what place art has in the world and what place the uniqueness of art has.

I’ve got all these things at my disposal: robots, AI image generators. When I came into it, with the Freeze catalogue in ’88 I had to have half the images in black and white because it was cheaper to do black-and-white printing. Now Joe and I are having a conversation at the minute about whether to do a global tour of the Cherry Blossoms—Joe nicknamed it “the circus comes to town”—where we build a huge fucking travelling pavilion with a great architect, with a little shop, cinema, café and toilets, and plonk it on the outskirts of towns.

We’ll have all the Cherry Blossom paintings, and we’ll charge $x a head. Everybody can come and see the show, and then it leaves and we’ll move to another city. You fly it from here to Sydney and then to New York. It’s just called The Cherry Blossoms—Damien Hirst.

So we think about that and say, okay, what’s the cost of insuring all the art, of transport? And it’s expensive. Then we realize we can actually make prints of the paintings now that you can’t tell them from the originals, and we could do them all in the same places at the same time. You don’t ship the paintings at all. You only ship the prints, and you can have it in as many places as you want whenever you want at very low cost. Should we be doing that? Is it about this object or not. If you can’t tell the difference, should you have the paintings? Should we have projections like what they’re doing with the Van Gogh exhibitions. Should we forget the paintings altogether? We make the paintings, we never exhibit the paintings and we just make 3D-films of the paintings. We make a kind of experience and we ship that all over the world where it all happens at the same time. What is good for the soul? How important is the original? Does it survive this bashing? What do people want?

JF: That’s the key, isn’t it? What do people want?

DH: It’s part of the key.

JF: Or have you got to tell them what they want?

DH: I mean, everybody says, nothing will beat the experience of standing in front of the actual artwork itself, one on one. Nothing can beat that and if anything different to that, you’ll feel it. Now you can photograph and create a Francis Bacon painting on a flat surface in a frame under glass that you put on a wall, and you can’t tell it from the original.

JF: Do you actually believe that?

DH: I know that as a fact. You say “do you actually believe that?” Well, we’ve always lived in a world where those kinds of reproductions couldn’t do it, whereas now they can. Now reproductions can be equal.

DH: Properly equal. Maybe better? It is possible to fool people, to trick people that something real isn’t real. The technology is there absolutely to create images that you can’t tell from paintings. Heni are doing it.

So how does it work for art? How can it work for artists? It puts into question all those things that you take for granted. When I said it’s no longer important to stand in front of an actual painting, you said “do you really believe that?” Because it’s sort of the last thing you have to believe. You have to believe you can tell the difference. But you can’t. You just can’t anymore. So first of all, you have to accept that you can’t, which is difficult.

JF: How about the smell?

DH: Yeah, everything. Whatever you want. Francis Bacon smells, the original one. A dog could sniff it. You can recreate that. Smear linseed oil on the back of a print and you’ll think you can smell it. This is the world we live in now. It could be trusted in the world we lived in that people thought you could tell the difference. It was just a given fact that it could be trusted. And now it no longer can, and that’s the thing that people haven’t realized. One day you will get to the point where you realize that it can’t be trusted anymore. The question becomes: What the fuck does it mean? And I don’t know what it means. All I know is we’re living in a world where you can’t tell and that the whole world will fail you at this hurdle. And that’s a big change.

JF: What is so quaint, somehow, is that people still want to have pictures, representational art usually, up on their bedroom walls.

DH: Yeah, that’s been around since we lived in caves—it’s the sacred thing we believe in. It’s that people need art. That’s what I mean—it doesn’t matter that there is no truth. People need it.

JF: They do need art. Why do they need art?

DH: It’s a fiction that represents truth, and we need truth, otherwise we can’t live. You can’t get out of bed. You can’t protect your children. There’s no point in protecting your children without truth. Which reminds me: Did I tell you about my posthumous paintings?

JF: Tell me about them.

DH: And the pre-posthumous paintings that Joe calls the ‘preposterous paintings.’

JF: I think that’s wonderful. Tell me how it works.

DH: I came up with the idea to continue making paintings after I’m dead. I always liked those family businesses that say “Hirst and Sons” over the door—it’s kind of like that. I’m working on the books now. I’m doing three hundred books for the first three hundred years after I’m dead.

Is it me or do these look really weird as landscape?

Yes now you've said that, they would be better square and showing the whole image. 

If these are from the show in 2018 or 2019 at White Cube, that show was amazing, BUT that was due to the size and scale of the work and that most were tondo.

Not sure these work the same in landscape.

Agreed, they would have looked much better in either tondo or square format showing the whole image, landscaped and cropped just doesn't work at all imo.

They're just pretty designs at the end of the day.

Stick some legs on them and you have an interesting coffee table. Nothing more.

Yeah exactly title makes no sense.