In 1996, cow-bisecting art superstar Damien Hirst entertained the Observer, greeting the journalist at the door draped in a towel. ‘I like taking my clothes off,’ he said later. An encounter with Hirst was something approached with trepidation: there were reports of ‘challenging’ behaviour; he had filled a Sunday Times interviewer’s handbag with flies; there had been some ‘unpleasantness’ involving a rat, a rubber glove and an art critic. Brian Sewell advised against shaking his hand: ‘limp, damp and unpleasant’.
But there was no unpleasantness; just Hirst’s trademark blend of ‘charm and confrontation’ as he explained the philosophy behind the headlines. He wanted, he said, to make ‘art everybody could believe in, even people who hate art – even my mother’. His creatures in glass cases were part of a pursuit of ‘a kind of realism’ that painting did not satisfy. ‘I’d have a brush and a canvas,’ he said, ‘and I’d think, well, what am I going to paint on this… A fucking horse? A dog?’
Hirst’s taste for provocation and the macabre started early, with a teenage preoccupation with ‘corpses, lesions and hospital waste’ that saw him collect pathology textbooks and steal a human ear from the morgue (he put it on a friend’s pizza). Age hadn’t mellowed him: ‘I think I have become more yobbish.’
Although Hirst had refocused on spot and swirl paintings (self-described as ‘dumb pictures. Paintings about the dumbness of painting’), the outré ideas kept coming. He wanted to ‘Get a dead dog in a gallery and just shoot it repeatedly’, was planning ‘four cows in no formaldehyde, rotting, fucking’ and even, with a human donor’s body, a ‘Minotaur in formaldehyde’, though he conceded that this presented some ‘logistical problems’.
The jury was out on whether Hirst’s ‘turbulent’ career would culminate in long-term renown and artistic immortality, for a man with ‘a romantic attachment to the idea of being an artist’, or whether shock would lose its power. The journalist risked a cheeky question: ‘Did he ever find himself tormented by the question: My God, is it all crap?’ ‘Of course,’ he said.
