KEY POINTS:
Joseph Rykwert doesn't think much of Damien Hirst's 50 million ($138 million) diamond-encrusted skull - even if it was manufactured by the most expensive living artist in the world. Art or commodity? It's about how you look at it.
"I find the visual effect of the whole thing a little bit kitsch, to use an old- fashioned term, suggesting an imbalance between preciosity and empty showiness which marks this object," the architectural historian tells an audience at the Auckland School of Architecture.
Rykwert, 82, has the credentials to make such a judgment. An authority on the history of art and architecture, with a swag of books to his name and a long academic career, including teaching at Cambridge and Essex Universities in England, he is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
Here for a symposium in his honour, his lecture is about rousing astonishment - part of the artist's stock in trade, attracting attention through the unexpected.
Doing it right, says Rykwert, is when the artist's mastery translates an idea into an effect which produces appreciation in the spectator.
But Hirst's works - "sharks, cows, zebras and formaldehyde aquaria, assorted basic polka dots on white backgrounds, cabinets full of medicine bottles, cigarette stubs, fake diamonds and suchlike" - represent the process gone terribly wrong.
And it's not just Hirst. All the visual arts - painting, sculpture and architecture - are afflicted by this uniquely 20th century malaise born out of blind faith in the free market, a blind belief in the automatic good of physical and economic growth.
The equivalent in architecture is what Rykwert calls "object buildings, whether high-tech or Emirate style" - buildings that are all show and often nicknamed. Think tower block monuments to oil wealth in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but also London's "Gherkin" by Norman Foster and "the Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Beijing.
Building as an advertising mass - distinctive and easily identifiable elements in the landscape - are stamped there like a corporate trademark, with little or no acknowledgment of culture.
What's lost in this parade of wealth, says Rykwert, is "the judicious eye", also the title of his latest book. Although they might be impressed by what's before them, the spectator is not seeing a thing of beauty or a work of art. The astonishment or amazement here is stimulated by something else.
As he points out, in Hirst's work, "it was the money that was truly astonishing". He's referring to an auction at Sotheby's held by the British artist in September. The star items were The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde which went for 10.3 million, and The Kingdom, a pickled tiger shark which fetched 9.6 million, 3 million above its estimate.
Some 218 items including a preserved zebra and a "unicorn" were sold for a total of 111 million, setting a record for a single-artist auction. As Rykwert puts it: "At the time it happened, this astonishment turned into a kind of horror."
But it's Hirst's skull that appals Rykwert more. The work, entitled For the Love of God - supposedly inspired by Hirst's mother, who once asked, "For the love of God, what are you going to do next?" - has 8601 diamonds over a platinum cast, with a pear-shaped pink diamond at the centre of the forehead. It didn't immediately get its 50 million asking price when put up for sale, but did in late August 2007, when it was bought by a consortium that included Hirst and his gallery White Cube.
At the time some wondered if this was a ruse to drum up publicity and rewrite the book value of Hirst's work.
"This is all in the realm of high financial speculation and outside the realm in which the judicious eye experiences its judgment," says Rykwert. He does the maths. The net cost of the diamonds and workmanship is about 12 million. Add, say, another 1 million for public relations and the surplus value which the artist adds to the gross value of the materials and manufacture is a staggering 37 million.
The skull may bring to mind the elaborate jewelled Easter eggs which Carl Fabergé made for the Russian emperors, but it is no match for their ingenuity, says Rykwert. Take, for example, the Trans Siberian Railway egg which included a wind-up toy train complete with miniature furniture inside the carriages. Rykwert argues no visible aspect of Hirst's skull provokes such astonishment.
"It is not its technical achievement ... nor its concern with death which marks it out ... the only thing that makes it truly amazing is its immense price."
The materials used are extremely expensive without being either rare or precious and the monetary value of the work becomes the prime mark of appreciation. In such a situation, says Rykwert, the eye no longer judges the work. Something has gone haywire.
We have forgotten a stage in the process from conception to reception.
In architecture, architects' projects are judged instead by their height and estimated costs, and the problems the project will cause the builder is called pushing the boundaries of technology.
But now, says Rykwert, the boundaries seem to be pushed for the sake of pushing and costs are skyrocketed for sheer effect.
The question has to be asked whether Rykwert, perhaps hankering for a more ordered time, has missed the whole point of Hirst's work. Does he not get the joke?
"I've been accused by people that I've missed the irony of the work of Manzoni and Duchamp," he tells his Auckland audience. The reference is to the Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who in 1961 offered art-buyers 90 tins of his own excrement, at a price equal to their weight in gold. And French artist Marcel Duchamp, often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, who prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing with his actions - such as dubbing a urinal "art" and naming it Fountain.
Rykwert puts Hirst in a similar camp, pointing out that Manzoni's tins have since been revealed not to contain faeces, but plaster. And that the famous urinal signed by Duchamp was used for its proper purpose by a French artist in a museum not long ago - for which he was arrested. He claimed what he was actually doing was in itself a work of art, an excuse apparently accepted by the judge.
So has Rykwert missed the joke? That the gullible art world would buy anything signed by an artist, even a tin of faeces, even if it was fake. And, as Duchamp's urinals show, that art is what you make it.
"If you inflate the means to achieve irony to such a degree that it involves you in making vast numbers of tins and reproducing vast numbers of urinals indefinitely by signing them over and over again," says Rykwert, "I think you are stretching wit to the point at which it dies and arguably is no longer irony but becomes satire."
Rykwert says his book, The Judicious Eye, Architecture Against the Other Arts, came out of an irritation with the way public space is treated in the 20th century city. The book recounts, over 200 years, architecture's break with the other visual arts and the increasingly marginalised role of the artist. The architect, on the other hand, is relegated to the professions alongside lawyers and doctors.
Rykwert looks for a way back - a means to heal the rift and reunite architecture with its lost siblings.
But the prospects don't look good. Of high-tech and Emirate-style buildings, he writes: "They are similarly separated by atrophied and wind-swept semi-public spaces that seem to cry out for some garnish, some tonic to articulate the ground level. This is usually provided by an out-of-scale and arbitrarily shaped sculptural object." The description is uncannily accurate for Auckland's Aotea and Queen Elizabeth Squares, as is his first impression of Auckland - "a city handed over to developers and traffic engineers". Bleak.
Rykwert notes that Hirst's record-breaking auction coincided with the economic meltdown and the fall of Lehman Brothers. Hirst himself has since admitted that his art had probably become too expensive. Rykwert takes some vindication from a statement by Tim Marlow, the director of exhibitions at London's White Cube gallery, part of the consortium that bought Hirst's skull.
"I'd actually argue that the skull contained within it the inevitability of bust," says Marlow. "One of the whole points about it was, 'You can't take it with you', and Damien said so. It subverted the idea of boom, and hinted at a downturn."
The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts (Footprint Books $66)
