Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst - The First Look

A documentary worth seeing.

Damien Hirst is an artist I have never quite fully understood, yet I never understood through fear. Fear of the ideas he presented. However, through years of maturing and now watching the channel 4 documentary “The First Look,” I understood that the man known as 'Mr Death’ is just a man with bursting mad, creative ideas and thriving on them. His jokey, fun character comes through in his art work, showing off his personality and what he believes is something worth looking at and debating over.

Hirst’s work is very controversial, making work you cannot possibly ignore. For example his piece ‘A Thousand Years,’ made up of a box hatching maggots into flies, a rooting cows head and an insect killer. A gruesome life cycle. Also, his most famous work ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,’ the shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde. He takes objects out of their normal habitats and puts it into artistic environments changing the way we see them, the way he sees it and especially for this piece is ‘facing our fears’.

A year after this work, Hirst still made a shocking piece, but I believe shocking in beauty. ‘In and Out of Love,’ is based in two rooms, one, a room of dead butterflies fixed onto canvas and in the other, the butterflies are born. It is simply a butterfly house in an art gallery, but what does this mean? How does it make sense? This piece, as Hirst states, give people hope, when we look at a dead butterfly they still look alive, all their beauty fully in tack.

What I took from this documentary was creativity, to be able to think outside the tradition beliefs of art;

“Confront things you can’t avoid.” (Damien Hirst)

Summing up Damien Hirst’s work and ideas, 

“He’s the naughty child making us confront our deepest fears,” Noel Fielding.

The Documentary.