For The Love of God (artwork) - Media Reporting and Reviews

Media Reporting and Reviews

The media coverage of the "sale" of the diamond skull was extensive and led some to question to what extent the announcement of the sale was some kind of media art, especially as the "sale" continues to be in question. This was further supported by the performative nature of the Sotheby's exhibition and auction of Hirst's artwork the following year.

In an article in The Guardian, Germaine Greer said, "Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative - revolutionary even."

Richard Dorment, art critic of The Daily Telegraph, wrote: "If anyone but Hirst had made this curious object, we would be struck by its vulgarity. It looks like the kind of thing Asprey or Harrods might sell to credulous visitors from the oil states with unlimited amounts of money to spend, little taste, and no knowledge of art. I can imagine it gracing the drawing room of some African dictator or Colombian drug baron. But not just anyone made it - Hirst did. Knowing this, we look at it in a different way and realise that in the most brutal, direct way possible, For the Love of God questions something about the morality of art and money."

Ralph Rugoff of the Hayward Gallery in London criticised the work as a mere decorative object, saying "It's not challenging or fresh. It's a decorative object which is not particularly well done."

Regarding the announcement of the "sale" of the diamond skull, Robert Preece, an art critic of Sculpture magazine, considers it to be a kind of media art performance with the appropriation of media structures. Referring to the Sotheby's "sale" and the "sale" of the diamond skull, he writes, "I am not concerned with the details of these sales. What matters to me is that they were announced--unleashed, picked up, printed, reprinted, accelerated, translated, and multiplied across global media." This sort of approach was highlighted with a Leeds 13 art/media intervention in 1998, in which artist Leeds 13 member Sarah Thornton has described the media coverage as "art" and the journalists as participants in the art performance, and artist as celebrity publicity maker extends back to Andy Warhol, and even Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. The performative nature was later addressed in the exhibition at Tate Modern, "Pop Life: Art in a material world", to which critic Ben Lewis found it very offensive: "... the gallery texts have the temerity to claim that the greed-fuelled auction sale was a work of performance art in itself. That’s just the same as Stockhausen calling 9/11 a work of art."