You probably already heard, and if you haven’t, you must have been living under a rock somewhere. Damian Hirst, and his representatives, Larry Gagosian and White Cube’s Jay Jopling, made a mint this week at Sotheby’s with his 'The Golden Calf'. Likely based on Poussin's painting of the same name, the work, valued at £12 million, sold to one of those so-called ‘secret’ buyers at £12.8 million.The Piece is a pretty flashy one, but I guess that's what happens once you bore of the more rotten, and frankly more intense and interesting, floating sharks, and goats injecting whatever it is they’re injecting in their static tanks. I'm figuring this sheen is what happens when an artist gets clean, shuns Groucho’s, and becomes super rich.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Hirst is a genius; I’m wild about his work. I’m just not feeling The Calf, the golden one. I'm not moved by the work in the same way as I was, so dramatically, so remarkably, by Hirst's earlier works. No. This one is too clean and shiny for me. It’s too slick and ostentatious. It feels almost vulgar. However, I get that this is a great piece. I absolutely do; but for me 'The Golden Calf' is like a like something you’d find in the foyer of a (ironically) sterile, possibly Eastern, snazzy hotel. And who knows, maybe that’s exactly where The Calf has gone to.
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