Critics all at sea over Damien Hirst’s sunken treasures

You can say this much for certain about Damien Hirst — he doesn’t do low-key and his latest exhibition is no exception.

Who can forget his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — a 4.25m-long tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a clear display case? Loved and hated in equal measure, Hirst’s work always generates headlines.

Hirst’s latest exhibition, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is no different. Enormous in scale, it is spread across a Venetian palace — the Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal and city’s former custom house, the Punta della Dogana. It has been seen as an effort to kickstart a career that has suffered since the global economic downturn in 2008.

The show itself is based on a myth of Amotan — an enormously wealthy freed slave from Antioch in north-west Turkey. The story goes that, in 2008, the wreck of his ship which sank 2,000 years ago —the Unbelievable — was found off East Africa, along with its cargo of artifacts.

A sculpture called ‘Hydra and Kali’ at the ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ by British artist Damien Hirst.

These lay on the seabed until Hirst put his money behind a project to raise them and display them in 2017, covered in barnacles and coral.

Of course, none of this is true, but it doesn’t make it any less impressive. There are sculptures of Goofy and Mickey Mouse that give the game away, not to mention the fact that the coral is painted on.

But, hey, one of the sculptures is over 18m high and is called Demon with Bowl. No doubt, it all cost a small fortune.

The 18m sculpture ‘Demon with Bowl’.

As with everything Hirst has ever done, the critics are sharply divided.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones gave the exhibition five stars, stating that it represented Hirst’s “titanic return to form”.

“This fictional museum is not only impressive but moving,” he wrote. “Hirst shares his passion with us. He obviously loves art, loves the dark and inexplicable mystery of it. Will Hirst one day be in the history books as a genius? It looks a hell of a lot more likely after this titanic return to form.”

People stand in front of ‘The Warrior and the Bear’ by British artist Damien Hirst at the press presentation of his exhibition.

Matthew Collings in the London Evening Standard also loved it, describing the exhibition as a “complicated triumph”.

However, Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph wasn’t quite so effusive, labelling the entire experience rather boring.

“Yet, rather than seeming grand and epic, it all feels tawdry and low-rent, tinny and fake,” he wrote. “This has a lot to do with the outmoded presiding visual style, best described as Eighties Po-Mo kitsch, and the many naked, quivering maidens, excitably menaced by monsters. Water, water everywhere — nor, sadly, any drop to drink: Treasures is Hirst’s Waterworld; in other words, a flop.”

A visitor walks past the ‘Calendar Stone’ by British artist Damien Hirst at the Pinault Collection in Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi. Pictures: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty

Writing in the Times, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, also suitably unimpressed describing the show as “a wreck”.

“The artist once impressed with his pickled shark and glittery skull, but his comeback in Venice is absurd — it should be dumped at sea,” she wrote.

But it’s not just the critics that have had their say. In March, animal activists left almost 40kg of manure outside the Palazzo Grassi with a simple message: “Damien Hirst Go Home.”

Apparently, they had no issue with animal cruelty but simply felt the exhibition was “an insult to a city of REAL art”.