ART HOLE
Cartrain is a 16-year-old graffiti artist who
creates Banksy-style stencils and collages
containing such recognisable figures as Mickey
Mouse, George Bush, Clint Eastwood and the Queen,
none of whom have ever objected. Damien Hirst is a
43-year-old, Turner prize-winning, world-famous
artist whose work For The Love of God, a platinum
cast of a human skull set with 8,601 diamonds, sold
for £50million last year.
Cartrain recently made a series of collages which
featured, amongst other things, photographs of
Hirst’s sculpture. Some imposed the bejewelled skull
over the faces of figures taken from other
photographs. One showed it sitting in a shopping
basket alongside a bunch of carrots. He displayed
them in the online gallery 100artworks.com, where
the average price for one of Cartrain’s collages is
£65.00.
He was contacted by the Design and Artists Copyright
Society, acting on the direct instructions of their
member Damien Hirst, informing him that he had
broken the law by infringing Hirst’s copyright.
Hirst demanded that he not only remove the works
from sale but “deliver up” the originals along with
any profit he had made on those that he had already
sold, or face legal action. The DACS, who refused to
comment on the matter when contacted by the Eye,
duly took delivery on Hirst’s behalf of four
collages by Cartrain on 12 November. They still
await the cash the teenager made from sales of his
work, which his gallery say is “around £200”. Until
it arrives, Hirst will have to get by on the
£95.7million he made in September in an
unprecedented direct auction of his own artworks,
held without the involvement of middlemen because he
felt that “there’s a hell of a lot of money in art -
but the artists don’t get it.”
Critics, meanwhile, see interesting influences in
Cartrain’s work – including that of Hymn by Damien
Hirst, who in May 2000 donated an “undisclosed sum”
to charity in lieu of his royalties on the £1m sale
of the work to Charles Saatchi after toymakers
Humbrol objected to the fact it was a direct copy of
their Young Scientist Anatomy Set. Or of the Fermat
spiral of circles at fixed divergence of
approximately 137˚ which mathematician Robert Dixon
developed, exhibited at the Royal College of Art,
and published in his book Mathographics, only to
find it reproduced with Damien Hirst’s name next to
it in the Guardian several years later (see Eyes
1086 and 1104). Or indeed For The Love of God, which
not only closely resembled a range of skull
jewellery sold by Butler and Wilson (see Eye 1186)
but also bore a strong resemblance to works by his
former friend and co-exhibitor John LeKay, who told
the Times last year that “I would like Damien to
acknowledge that ‘John really did inspire the skull
and influenced my work a lot’. Damien’s very
insecure about his originality.”
Original source
http://adammacqueen.blogspot.com/2008/11/eyelights.html
