the only certainties are death and capital¹

“This isn’t just art that exists in the market, or is ‘about’ the market. This is art that is the market — a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value, and only secondarily have any other function or virtue.” So wrote Hari Kunzru of Damien Hirst’s work in the Guardian.² I’m not interested in rehearsing here discussions of Hirst’s merit as an artist; what interests me instead is his symptomatic status as a figure who embodies capital’s penetration into all areas of culture. As Kunzru points out, Hirst’s own relationship to capital is more than close. He is a “house artist to the 1%”, and the way that value is generated out of his work — a mixture of hype and the exploitation of the poorly remunerated “assistants” who actually produce many of the pieces — is a model of how exchange value is created in late capitalism. Hirst’s notorious auction, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, took place at the very moment that Lehman Brothers was collapsing. But while the banks failed, Hirst remains a powerful brand. In fact, some of Hirst’s pieces were among the works that were auctioned when Lehman Brothers’ art collection was sold off in order to recoup something for the bank’s creditors. The way that the prices of Hirst’s pieces became not just part of the story of the works, but practically their sole interest, reminds me of nothing so much as Michael Jackson after Thriller. Yet, while Jackson was tragically maddened and destroyed by the colossal scale of his success, Hirst gives every impression of being perfectly at home at the heart of a vast capital-generating factory.

The current Hirst retrospective at the Tate should now look like a reliquary of bygone world, but it merely highlights that art and culture have yet to come to terms with the traumatic events of 2008. Our imaginations are still dominated (or stultified) by work which emerged from the cocaine-buzzy mixture of hedonism, cynicism and piety which governed art and politics in the 1990s and 2000s. Hirst is the Warhol of capitalist realism, but he has none of Warhol’s blank charisma. In place of Warhol’s android awkwardness, Hirst offers a blokish bonhomie. Warhol’s studied banality has become the genuinely ultrabanal. Or, rather, the Hirst phenomenon typifies the way in which, in late-capitalist art and entertainment culture, the ultrabanal and the super-spectacular have become (con)fused. Watching Hirst halfheartedly reiterate half-baked clichés — death as the antithesis of life; art as religion — while he was being interviewed in the television coverage that surrounded his current retrospective at the Tate, I was struck by the guilelessness of his thinking. But, then again, what is there to say about this work that it doesn’t already say itself? For all its fixation on death, this is work that, in its bleak immanence, repudiates negativity, and leaves no space for commentary.

It is this obdurate refusal to be more than what it is that makes Hirst’s work flat with what I have called capitalist realism. Capitalist realism refers to a set of political beliefs and positions, but also a set of aesthetic impasses. “Realism” here does not connote a realist style so much as the inability to see, think or imagine beyond capitalist categories. It’s no accident that “reality” entertainment came to the fore in the unprecedented period of neoliberal domination before the bank crises of 2008. Hirst’s work belongs to a corresponding development that we might call reality art. The dead animals in the formaldehyde really are dead animals. The skull really is a skull. This inertial tautology may be the real “point” of Hirst’s work, and also the reason it emptily but emphatically resonated in a neoliberal era characterised by political fatalism and the corrosion of social imagination. Things are as they are; they cannot be re-imagined, transfigured, or changed. Is there any art object which better captures this than the diamond-encrusted skull of Hirst’s “For The Love Of God”, the object which, more than any other, may come to stand for the decadence and vanity of the pre-2008 neoliberal world? “For The Love Of God” makes explicit the guiding logic of much of Hirst’s work: the only certainties are death and capital. But it can tell us nothing about this. It is a mute symptom which exemplifies a condition it can neither describe nor transcend.