Intercepted from Latest art magazine, UK

My contention is that the contemporary art scene is
cynical, marketed rebellion. far from being
innovative, vital and avant-garde, it bears direct
compression
with the Victorian salon and treats art in very much
the same way: as rich mans sausages.
 
Encrusting a platinum scull with diamonds to belie the
artists fear of death - and gratify his obsession
with wealth - lends a certain hollow glamour to a news
bulletin and prospective sausage buyers, but does
nothing for the poetic hart.
 
To popularize art, as Tate modern endeavors to do, is to
completely miss the point of art, which is not to
compete with fashion and pop music but to add depth
and resonance to the lives of people living in an ever
flimsy and ephemeral world.
 
Popularizing a trip to the gallery by turning the
gallery into an amusement park is not a victory for art
but a victory for amusement parks.
Likewise, popularizing a trip to the gallery by turning
the gallery into the scene of a car accident is not a
victory for art but a victory for base and morbid
curiosity.
 
The contemporary artist needs to understand that all
though amusement and morbidity are part of our
experience of life and art, life and art are not are
not merely amusement and morbidity:
Art is a personal and transmuted representation of
experience, not merely the repetition of the experience
itself, or the lazy artists sausagey finger pointing at
it.
If you like, it dose not nurture the suffering soul to
present it with a shit in bowl.
 
Art that in riches our life's requires a commitment and
love and the the touch of the fairies. art needs to
bring beauty into life but not glamour. To stay awake
the artist purposefully sits on the wrong end of the
see-saw.
 
Billy Childish. 6.6.07
 

Damien Hirst with For the Love of God