Responses
In a speech at the Royal Academy in 2004, art critic Robert Hughes used The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living as a prime example of how the international art market at the time was a "cultural obscenity". Without naming the artwork or the artist, he stated that brush marks in the lace collar of a painting by Velázquez could be more radical than a shark "murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames".
Hirst's response to those who said that anyone could have done this artwork was, "But you didn't, did you?"
In 2003, under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch shop, JD Electrical Supplies, and asked, "If Hirst’s shark is recognised as great art, then how come Eddie's, which was on exhibition for two years beforehand, isn’t? Do we perhaps have here an undiscovered artist of genius, who got there first, or is it that a dead shark isn't art at all?" The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have got the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.
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Famous quotes containing the word responses:
“Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.”
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