DamienHirstsDeathDriveOnthepost-ironicartofJeffKoonsandDamienHirst.docVIP

DAMIEN HIRST’S DEATH DRIVE: On the Post-Ironic Art of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst Art is the closest you can get to immortality – Damien Hirst  Jeff Koons, Puppy (1992) Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992) It could be argued that the current era in art began with two animals – Jeff Koons’ dog and Damien Hirst’s shark. Before them, there is post-modernism, which is critical and in which there is a distance between art and its subject matter. After them, there is what we might call the contemporary, which is post-critical and in which there is no distance between art and its subject matter. But in order to try to explain this distinction, let us begin with Koons’ dog. Before making Puppy (1992), Koons was best known for a series of works featuring basketballs, bar equipment and vacuum cleaners. As one of the members of the “simulationist” art movement of the 1980s, his work was understood to be based on the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s critique of the “sign”. Thus Haim Steinbach’s dolls and ceramics mounted on walls or Koons’ vacuum cleaners housed in glass vitrines were spoken of by critics as an analysis of the “charms with which Madison Avenue tempts the American consumer”.1 In many ways, of course, these simulationists were merely updating Warhol’s original parody of consumerism in his Brillo Boxes (1963) and Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962). The absurdly detailed descriptions of the various vacuum cleaners in Koons’ The New (1980-6) – New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polisher, New Hoover Convertible and New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker – remind us of the equally unnecessary proliferation of flavours in Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans. Of course, the variety of different soups in Warhol and of vacuum cleaners in Koons is intended as a commentary on the unchecked production of marginally differentiated consumer items in advanced capitalism. After all, who could really taste the difference between the Green and Split P