Memento mori by Damien Hirst

Genius is easy. Genius means that everybody isn’t an artist. Freedom means that everybody is an artist. I believe in freedom. I don’t believe in genius. I don’t think that artists are special people. I think they’re normal people who have managed to harness somehow what is important for everybody. I don’t think they’re born special..." — Damien Hirst.

With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead, 

And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed: 

And the first Morning of Creation wrote 

What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

For I remember stopping by the way 

To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay: 

And with its all-obliterated Tongue 

It murmur'd--"Gently, Brother, gently, pray!"

Omar Khayam.

As a student of BHSAD I consider the event of Hirst in Moscow as very important personally. From the very beginning it looked pretty unusual that the collector is an artist at the same time. I tried to know more of his biography and found a very strong personality building his own life along with philosophy and art.

At the exhibition again the vanishing border between the art and reality (for me symbolized as zebra) is important.  The idea is that life has black and white stripes, and If we will delete black ones, it will looks not very good and feels the same way because if you can not feel something “bad”, how will you know what is “good”?  The scull appearing in the Picasso as well as a’naturel. I recognized that it is a very interesting art object by itself that everybody contains inside, including myself. So, the skull play the role of universal metaphor (as existential question ‘to be, or not to be’) of art as something that is inside and something you see with your brain  - more then with your eyes. The skull is also a symbol of caducity of our life and of its turnover like at Picasso artwork or Khayam poetry.

I think that talent is not the most important thing for the artist. Hirst’s position is a relief for me. At the same time – if there is no difference between work of a genius and that of an ordinary person than – what is Mr. Hirst’s business? How the art made him the richest artist in Britain? I am perplexed.

I do not know how I would react to “ The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” and to all this formaldegized and dissected animals, but surprisingly the objects at this exhibition did not cause loathe at me.

Marfa Bulin-Sokolova