Cool or Creepy?

Damien Hirst, a British artist, just had one of his works sell at a Sotheby's auction for 9.65 million pounds. For those of us who are of the American persuasion, that's close to $20 million. News organizations are making a fuss about this because it has set the record for the most paid for the work of a living artist at an auction.

So what is this $20 million piece of art? It's a medicine cabinet. A 9-foot wide medicine cabinet filled with 6, 136 individually painted pills entitled "Lullaby Spring." The picture to the right shows just a section of the rows upon rows of colorful little pills.

Now, I have to admit--I first stumbled across this story because I saw this picture on Yahoo pictures, and thought it looked really cool. All sorts of different colorful objects, all in the same place? Pretty! And i can certainly appreciate how long it would take to individually craft 6000+ tiny pills, particularly if many were as intricately painted as the big black one in the upper left of the picture.

The more I think about it, though, the less I would like to have this work of art in my house. Forget the nightmare of cleaning it, I'm starting to see the whole work as slightly sinister. I'm not Tom Cruise or anything, but I do think that our society tends to use pills as a quick fix for many problems, instead of looking to fix the root cause of those problems. It seems that this piece could easily be read as a glorification of fixing any and all problem with pills. And when I think about this in combination with the title--"Lullaby Spring"--it makes me even more hesitant to like it. "Lullaby" is a word of comfort, of soothing, of trying to ease the concerns of the world away so that you can rest. And "spring" suggests new life, a new start. But if you can only get that comfort and that new start through prescription (or other) drugs, at the expense of forgetting the real things in your life, is it really worth it? Is that a healthy way to live?

It's entirely possible that I'm over-reading the entire piece (grad students tend to do that) but even so, the sale of this piece for close to $20 million highlights another disturbing trend--the ever growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. When another work from this Hirst series sold in February, it went for $7.4 million; 5 years ago, that same piece had been sold for only $1.1 million. Bill Bonner writes, "The inflation in contemporary art is breathtaking; it illustrates how nouveau and how riche the nouveau riche really are."

And that's perhaps the biggest problem with Damien Hirst's "Lullaby Spring"--that there are people out there who can and do pay $20 million without blinking an eye for the work of an artist who has not yet stood the test of time. And when the world is set up in such a way so that these people can exist alongside those who are working two jobs just so their kids can have clothes and food, there's something wrong with that picture.

Boy, this blog has gotten kinda serious lately...I should post on Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan to balance things out...Here's a picture, maybe that will help: