MEMENTO MORI
Thanks for nothing, Damien Hirst*. Between you and Jack Sparrow the world’s population has been inundated with images of skulls nonstop for the better part of ten years. Your diamond-encrusted skulls have made tattoos not cool, and that’s no mean feat. Tattoos have been awesome for millions of years.
This skull shit has been going on for so long now that we can’t even see one on a rock poster or a tee shirt without thinking about the Bush administration – which dovetails perfectly with the equally-annoying conspiracy talk from that same era that reminds us of the Baron Samedi / Papa Doc paranoia from Graham Greene’s The Comedians.
What?
Okay.
Skulls are, anymore, lazy and in poor taste.
At TUMULT we recognize that bad style is going to exist for as long as does good style. It is something that we all must tolerate lest we all look the same. And we also accept that the UFC has to sell tee shirts if they’re going to continue to bring about the end of civilized society. And that the poor souls who work for Ed Hardy need to eat and to pay their bills.
So we beseech these people, like Damien Hirst, these mavens of ugly fashion, that they might switch from skulls as a defining theme to spiders. Spiders are not yet as totally dead as skulls are. And they’re just as scary as skulls, if a little less macabre. They have the added benefit of being things that a person has a much greater likelihood of actually encountering in their lives than a human skull. We’re sure you guys could sell just as many spider things as you do skull things. A diamond spider would actually be kind of neat. Mr. Hirst could present them as Louise Bourgeois visual puns.
Jean-Baptiste Noir’s entire wardrobe consists of the fine suits he inherited from his grandfather. He is TUMULT’s chief fashion correspondent.
* At TUMULT, we consider Damien Hirst to be the Kevin Garnett of the fine art world. When he did that thing where he took his new collection directly to auction, eliminating the gallery system’s involvement in his handling, it might appear as though he “broke the bank” in the same way that Garnett did when he got that $126M contract extension with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Whether or not the fallout associated with these events – in Hirst’s case a dramatic decline in fine art sales, and in Garnett’s the NBA lockout that soon followed – actually had anything to do with these individuals is debatable. But Hirst and Garnett remain symbols for bloated institutions riddled with irresponsible spending and in desperate need of reform.
