Rembrandt Van Rijn The Anatomy Lesson
Damien Hirst's For the Love of God is at least a clever joke against a certain way of understanding Walter Benjamins ideas about art and its aura. The object and its artness being seperable, the object is made not banal in the manner of Schwitters but is literally a human skull; and this quality of artness is literally encrustation with diamonds.
The work does though presuppose a seriousness in the politics it falls into such that its patrons aren't seen to be in pure appreciation of its ostensible content: money/death, but at one degree's remove.
Is this work subversive? At least in Schumpeter's sense of altering the relations that constitute the local market? Only if all works of art were owned by corporations that issued shares, could we immediately deduce to what extent the production of For the Love of God has revalued other works in this genre, and if Hirst's new work validates in turn the adoption of a more bearish position with respect to Manzoni's canned shit, for example.
