Damien Hirst and the controversial use of art assistants
Having apprentices is a time-honoured art tradition. For both artist and assistant, it’s beneficial – one gets a much-needed helping hand from an overly keen student, the other a chance at becoming their protege by learning from the best. Renaissance masters held workshops to teach their craft, and Andy Warhol had his own literal Factory to wheel out mass-produced pop art. But for some reason, whether it was his approach to the use of assistant – which tended to be some variant of “I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it” – Damien Hirst‘s use of art assistants has been highly controversial.
For many art critics, the issue is that Hirst, who was once said to have employed over 100 assistants, isn’t as directly involved in the creative process as he should be. Another issue arose during the pandemic when he laid off 63 of them despite claiming a staggering £15m in emergency Covid-19 loans from the government. But focusing solely on the creative issues, it’s still unclear why his use of assistants is so contentious.
Hirst and David Hockey had a brief spat over the issue, with Hockney making unsubtle digs in his own work. “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally,” read posters at his 2012 Royal Academy show.
Hockney, who is obviously the more traditional artist of the two, said conceptual teachings in art schools have given rise to art that is “a little insulting to craftsmen”, saying: “I used to point out [that] at art school, you can teach the craft; it’s the poetry you can’t teach. But now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft.”
Hockney recalled having similar conversations with Lucian Freud about the “old man’s art” of painting. On that front, he does have a point when it comes to Hirst, who only painted five out of 1,500 of his spot paintings. A small army of artists were employed to dutifully paint the spots and largely had no contact with him throughout.
In his autobiography, he named one of his best spotters as an artist called Rachel Howard, which at least assuaged worries about the assistant efforts going noticed. “The best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She’s brilliant – absolutely fucking brilliant,” he said. “The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by her”. The idea that the best Hirst piece viewers could ever lay eyes on wasn’t by him at all challenges his entire role as an artist, but he has always defended having some help.
“I controlled every aspect of them coming into being and much more than just designing them or even ordering them over the phone,” he explained. “My hand is evidence in the paintings everywhere. I think it’s important that they are handmade but equally important that they look machine-made.”
To that end, his work strikes a similar conceptual tone to Warhol’s, making the distinctly modern argument that the concept driving an artwork is more important than who creates it.
