memento

"In psychological terms, we may say that as a service economy we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work on the world that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuili and televised experience: never in any previous civilisation have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless."

But anyway, reading these lines I for some reason thought of Damien Hirst, for whom the 'great metaphysical questions' are cynically repeated as blank pastiche.

In particular, Hirst's titles - 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living ' 'The Fate of Man', etc. There is not, nor is there meant to be, a necesssary or interesting relation between title and work. These titles do little more than signifiy the title of an artwork (like Lewis Carroll's 'the name of this poem is called'). They connote titles rather than being titles, nodding to the doxa that art 'deals with' such questions as Death and so forth. This is something weaker than irony, a kind of nihilistic repetition of 'the great metaphysical preoccupations'. It's unlikely that even the buyers of Hirst's work are 'fooled' by all this, that they genuinely think his work has metaphysical seriousness. They are content to play the game, knowing the counters are empty, mere signatures of preoccupations long sinced dissolved in irony and advertising.