He was once the king of controversy in the British art world, but Damien Hirst has been declared a spent force by Dame Tracey Emin – who believes all male artists suffer a creative decline in their 40s.
Hirst, 59, shot to fame in the 90s with controversial works such as Mother and Child, Divided, a formaldehyde sculpture consisting of the severed carcasses of a cow and a calf.
Like Emin, 61, who forged her reputation in similarly eyebrow-raising fashion with works like My Bed, with its stained sheets and discarded condoms, Hirst was in the vanguard of the Young British Artists movement that spawned in London in the late 1980s.
But Emin feels the certitude and power that characterised her YBA contemporary’s early work has faded, a development that she sees as inevitable among male artists when they reach middle age.
‘I think it’s really hard to be an artist,’ Emin said. ‘I think it’s really difficult. I think people who don’t make art or don’t attempt to be an artist, don’t understand how difficult it is to have that conviction, that self-belief and everything.
‘Damien was a young artist that started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction. He was like a force. And now he’s not.’
Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, both Turner prize nominees who rose to prominence as part of the Young British Artists movement, attend a party at Claridge’s hotel in London in 2010
British artist Tracey Emin, seen here receiving a Women of the Year lifetime achievement award in London, believes her contemporary Damien Hirst is a spent force
Emin, pictured with her celebrated 1998 work My Bed, feels that whereas male artists typically peak in their 40s, their female counterparts have greater creative endurance
Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child, Divided, comprised of a cow and a calf bisected and suspended in formaldehyde, won the 1995 Turner prize
Emin said that while she did not dislike Hirst’s more recent work, his perceived decline was consistent with a broader tendency for male artists to lack the creative staying power of their female counterparts.
‘I think a lot of male artists in general, I always say this, sort of peak in their 40s,’ said Emin, who like Hirst is a former Turner prize nominee.
‘Women just tend to come and come and come and come and come. So as a woman, you carry on coming all your life, until you’re old.’
By way of example, Emin pointed to the work of Louise Bourgeois, the French-American artist best known for her huge spider sculptures, who continued working until she died aged 98 in 2010.
Emin also highlighted the work of the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, who died in 1992 at the age of 67.
‘Women have the capacity of doing that as long as they’re given the opportunity to do it,’ Emin told the Louis Theroux podcast. ‘If you look at Joan Mitchell, for example, she’s like undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock.’
Hirst won the Turner prize in 1995 and is reportedly Britain’s richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at £294 million by the Sunday Times in 2020.
But success has not insulated the provocateur from criticism.
Hirst poses with The immortal (1999), a white shark that formed part of his Cornucopia exhibition at the Oceanography Museum in Monaco in 2010
Damien Hirst poses with The Golden Calf, which was sold at Sotheby’s in 2018 for £10.3 million, making it the most expensive artwork he has sold
Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, a sprawling, £50 million exhibition staged in Venice in 2017, was described by the online art forum Hyperallergic as ‘the most expensive artistic flop in living memory’.
More recently, it has been alleged that formaldehyde sculptures made in 2017 were artificially aged to make it look at though they were fashioned in the 1990s.
‘I think a lot of men peak in their 40s,’ said Emin, ‘and women continue.’
‘So maybe Damien peaked, I don’t know, we’ll have to see. Only time will tell.’
Emin, who was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2020 and subsequently underwent major surgery, was awarded a damehood for services to British art this year.
She shook hands with the King and Queen at a Buckingham Palace garden party this summer, and believes Britain should embrace its monarchy.
‘I like all the pomp and ceremony of the royal family a lot,’ said Emin. ‘I love it. I think Britain, at the moment, definitely doesn’t do many things well. That, we’re always going to be number one in.
‘So I think rather than lose something we’re really good at, why don’t we embrace it and find the right position for it and use it and keep it and enjoy it, because it’s quite splendid. It’s quite amazing; it’s quite, quite brilliant.’
The former bad girl of British art is not quite ready to become a card-carry member of the establishment yet, however.
‘I would never, ever, ever want or wish to be part of the royal family,’ she added. ‘When you see what they have to do and how they live and how restricted their lives are, I think it’s like a kind of living hell.’
