Killing the Emperors Read Free Page B

‘Right. Now pay attention, Ellis. Our hero split a cow and a calf from nose to tail…’ She paused. ‘Silly me. Of course he didn’t. Hirst doesn’t do anything much himself other than marketing. He has an atelier, where his assistants do the actual work. Apparently at one time he had as many as a hundred.’ She snorted. ‘I try to maintain my sense of humour about all this, but when I hear some halfwit explaining that Hirst is merely following in the footsteps of Rembrandt, who had a stable of students and helpers, sometimes I want to explode. Rembrandt was a genius, he taught the gifted young how to emulate him and he would let them paint less important bits of some of his pictures and occasionally their copies of his work got passed off as his. But to mention him in the same breath as bloody Hirst is blasphemy.’
    ‘True, Jack, but calm down,’ said Mary Lou. ‘Get on with the story.’
    ‘He had a dead cow and calf split, exhibited each of the four halves in a separate chic vitrine and called the result Mother and Child, Divided . It won the Turner Prize, which, as you will know, is named after an innovative painter of genius and is awarded annually to whatever bluffer has caught the eye of the knaves and fools who dominate the contemporary art world.’ She took an invigorating swallow. ‘Particularly the eye of the said Sir Nicholas Serota—or Sclerota, as I prefer to call him—who’s been the prize’s guiding genius.
    ‘So anyway, my cunning plan was to string up Hirst, split his cadaver and call the result Hanged for a Calf? Note the question mark after ‘calf.’ Arguing about the significance of that could keep imbecilic critics happy for years.’ She shook her head. ‘But then I thought leaving his corpse unadorned would represent a lost opportunity. As you know, I am a thorough woman. This would be a perfect opportunity to display a wide range of his …’ As she always did when preparing to favour her listeners with her Churchillian French, the baroness paused, set her lips in an exaggerated moue and enunciated painstakingly, ‘… oeuvres id-i-o-tique de plagiaire .’
    ‘So he’s a plagiarist as well as talentless?’ asked Pooley.
    ‘Let’s say his detractors point out that there’s nothing he’s done that someone else didn’t do first. A bloke called Ernie Saunders had a preserved shark—which he’d actually caught himself—on the wall of his shop in Shoreditch in 1989, two years before young Damien even placed the order for his dead fish. It was exhibited in 2003 in a gallery run by the Stuckists under the title A Dead Shark Isn’t Art .’
    ‘Stuckists?’
    ‘The Stuckists have a quaint old-fashioned view that artists should be able to draw and paint, and rightly dismiss conceptual art as pretentious, specious, nihilistic rubbish. The name is courtesy of Tracey Emin herself, who once shrieked ‘“tuck! Stuck! Stuck!” at an artistic boyfriend whose painting was insufficiently avant garde for her taste.’
    ‘Did anyone buy Saunders’ shark?’
    ‘Of course not. He offered it for a bargain million quid, pointing out that would save the buyer of his pickled shark more than five mill compared to what he described as “the Damien Hirst copy”, but there were no takers.’
    ‘Hirst was a brand by then, hon,’ explained Mary Lou. ‘As far as the art establishment was concerned, he had a monopoly on dead fish and animals.’
    The baroness emitted another snort. ‘Even though a bloke called John LeKay, whom he was very close to for a while, had exhibited animal carcasses years before Hirst produced his cattle. And lent him a science catalogue showing a cow bisected lengthways which inspired Mother and Child, Divided. ’
    She leaned forward and shook her finger at Pooley. ‘Then there was the sculpture, Hymn , a hugely enlarged version of a torso from his son’s anatomy set, which bore a startling resemblance to Yin and Yang , an anatomical torso exhibited a few