Damien Hirst’s For The Love Of God

At the dark heart of Damien Hirst’s new show Beyond Belief is a piece entitled For the Love of God. Shown in an illuminated glass case in a darkened room on the top floor of the White Cube gallery in St James’s, it consists of a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum, its surface covered by 8,601 flawless pavé diamonds, weighing a total of 1,106.18 carats. Crucial to the work’s meaning is the asking price of £50 million.

If anyone but Hirst had made this curious

 object, we would be struck by its vulgarity. It looks like the kind of thing Asprey or Harrods might sell to credulous visitors from the oil states with unlimited amounts of money to spend, little taste, and no knowledge of art. I can imagine it gracing the drawing room of some African dictator or Colombian drug baron.

But not just anyone made it – Hirst did. Knowing this, we look at it in a different way and realise that in the most brutal, direct way possible, For the Love of God questions something about the morality of art and money.

This is something I’ve often wondered about when I read of the fantastic prices private individuals pay for works by Picasso, Klimt and Warhol. How do these people sleep at night, knowing that the hundred million they just spent could have endowed schools, built hospitals, eradicated diseases and alleviated hunger? Don’t they think about the morality of pouring so much wealth into something as dead as a diamond necklace, a painting, a private jet?

Once you begin to think in this way, Hirst’s title becomes ambiguous, for it is a phrase that can be said in exasperation – as in “For the love of God, what are we all thinking?” For the Love of God is a hand grenade thrown into the decadent, greedy, and profoundly amoral world where art meets money.

But it is more. By ensuring that the price he is asking for the skull receives the maximum amount of publicity, Hirst has also made sure that whoever buys it will never be able to enjoy it. Like the Ring of the Nibelung, this glittering, deadly prize will prove at some level a curse to the person who possesses it.

I can’t remember another art work that so perfectly embodies the cynicism and ambivalence successful artists must feel towards those who promote and collect their work. Part of what interests me so much about this whole project is the fact that Hirst is the main person who will profit by its sale. Confusing, but fascinating.

And if you think I may be attributing to Hirst a subtlety that his art doesn’t sustain, look at the rest of the show at White Cube. Hirst turns the whole large gallery into a meditation on life and death, good and evil. On the walls of the ground-floor galleries, he hangs paintings based on photos taken during the difficult birth of his son by caesarean section. Painted by studio assistants, from a technical or formal point of view, these are pretty abysmal. But as expressions of the joy, pain and horror of life (as opposed to the utter nullity of the diamond-covered skull) they are immensely touching.

Even the horrible paintings based on photos of cancer cells and the eviscerated fish and animals shown in vitrines in the basement are part of a natural cycle of life and death that the skull doesn’t belong to.

As usual, Hirst gives these works titles that make it impossible to miss their Christian context. The most beautiful work of all is a dove with outstretched wings in a glass vitrine. It is a dove of peace, but also the emblem of the Holy Spirit, which is after all, the love of God. Its title, The Incomplete Truth links it directly to the skull. For the dove symbolises the exact opposite of everything the skull stands for, and yet the one is incomplete without the other, just as the totality of human experience is made up of evil as well as good.