Feel alikes

Pictured above are possibly the two greatest artist statements on the art market ever produced. On the left, speaking for the 20th century Piero Manzoni and on the right, for the 21st, Damien Hirst. This comment by Jonathan Jones, in the Guardian on 5 June, struck a chord. “For the wonder at the crystalline heart of this exhibition is not only a memento mori, a death's head. It is also a birth, as scary as shattering as the one TS Eliot's Magi witnessed: a birth like a death. What is being born, exactly? It might be the art of the 21st century…. Hirst has created an object that has nothing to do with the 20th century, that owes as little to Marcel Duchamp as it does to Picasso, that has nothing to do with the Holocaust or 1917 or any of the 20th century's memories ... a work of art, in fact, that could have been created in any century but that one. Art has struggled to escape the 20th century because its first half was a great aesthetic period that cast a long shadow. Hirst, though, has broken through.”