damien hirst vs vaporwave in the pandemic culture

Result #1

wars. Hirsts last works, now worn out and hard to come by, are the last large-scale works we can imagine him making. When you consider that Hirst has given over so much of himself to his art, its no surprise that he continues to be slow to release. He is a person whose work has never really been free, and a person who believes that there are no free passes. His work is under an iron grip—the iron of the oppressive power structures. He refuses to let go, though he is not content to let others take his place. He has worked through a lot to get here. He has been through the full arsenal of oppression. He is still wearing a mask, and he will continue to be masked.

Result #2

of R. Crumb, while the show is in fact a confessional: Shes a visual artist who gives art a personality, a history, a backstory, and a high-tech fantasy. Shes a fashion model, a filmmaker, a social realist, a lay artist, a natural artist, and a screenwriter. She paints, she makes art, she writes and edits, she directs and edits, she makes art about art, she writes and edits the art, she gives her art a backstory. She is the most complicated artist to ever make an impression.

Result #3

damien hirst vs vaporwave in the pandemic culture of Airtime, 1994, by the artist's first solo show at the Kunsthalle in Berlin. There, the bare-chested and unclothed figure of the artist and her half-naked companion, a former model and now a regular at the gallery, shared space. Only their identifications as artists and artists-in-residence changed every time the two artists appeared on the screens of the exhibition's two monitors: On the German screens, the naked models legs and ankles were rendered in glowing fluorescent colors. On the German screens, one found a picture of a flower, which in turn was covered with more fluorescent colors. On the American ones, the models legs were covered in wax, and their torso was filled in with frosting. This memory of the sacred in nature—of the purity of a fleshy flower—reminds us of the artists relationship with nature. In contrast to the German example, where the nudity is so explicit, the paired models are mostly undisturbed. On the American screens, the wax was melted, and the legs were photographed, like a level on a computer-generated image of the city, while on the German ones, a third image showed the models legs in a complete state of withdrawal. They are still wet, but the wax has melted and the body is covered with water. We see the models, their legs and bodies, in one of the most beautiful pictures in the exhibition: a kind of photograph of the summits of the world, lit by the flame of a candle.The two shows in Cologne were also accompanied by two drawings: one on paper, made for the occasion of the Kunsthaus Zurich and the other of plaster casts of both kinds of creatures, the artist's own and his models'. In Zurich, these objects were placed in a large wooden box, the kind that can be used as a display case.

Result #4

of the late 90s. In both cases, the artist confronts the dissolution of identity through the use of the figural forms of postindustrial culture.

Result #5

damien hirst vs vaporwave in the pandemic culture wars: the latter has recently won a major cult film, a collaboration with the creative director of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Mikhail Brezhnev. Brezhnev, whose work has been a kind of underground musical with the sonic background of a rock band, has no problem with the idea of the sound of silence, or of peace. He also sees an urgent need to include a group of artists who are explicitly concerned with preserving the future of the country, and who will speak its language—that of capitalism. With this in mind, Brezhnev had himself as his model, performing, at least metaphorically, the simple task of making an abstract art that would exist outside the country. The show included only one work, a photograph of Brezhnev taken in 2014, when he was one of the first artists to be granted the right to work in the capital of the Soviet Union. A film on a monitor showed a small group of people, some of them wearing the insignia of the first ever Soviet film club, a symbol of the historic connection between the USSR and the West. The images on the monitors were the same ones Brezhnev shot in the cities of Yekaterinburg and Moscow when he was a student in the Soviet Union. Like Brezhnev, the Soviet artist is aware of the negative consequences of the entire Western imperialist project, and he intends to fight it. But for Brezhnev, it is a personal struggle that is addressed to himself. These are not fantasies of the artist as martyr. The show was, however, an accurate reflection of Brezhnevs own position as an artist who has been forced to take a position that both sides of the ideological divide must take.