Blog Post on Damien Hirst's Beheading of John the Baptist

 

Damien Hirst is famous for pushing the boundaries of orthodox beauty by combining absurdity with grosteque. His famous exhibition "Natural History" not only received a lot of our attention but also raised many ethical and moral questions within the art scene.

 

He is a self-proclaimed conceptual artist whereas the conceptual art is without form and only exists in essence itself. 

Damien Hirst used the sinks filled with formaldehyde to embalm the animals to depict biblical, classical and scientific concepts by using macabre style of art.

Taxidermy is considered an art form but the techniques he use are not taxidermy but more of embalming since it utilizes an abundance of formaldehyde.

 

The Beheading of John the Baptist

 

This artwork is particularly interesting to me. Since it depicts the beheading of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas. But the medium he used was real flesh and blood which is mortifying and grotesque to say the least. The question then is, what is conceptual art and the value of the said art in this art piece? Is it ethically correct to use a cadaver of an animal to depict his concept? These are the questions we must explore to learn more about this morally questionable piece of macabre. 

 

Not every animals involved in the exhibition but a lot of animals were slaughtered, bisected and disemboweled to get the position and adjustments he wanted to display. While the orthodox practice of art uses the standard art supplies, there is no boundary in techniques and materials to create conceptual artwork. 

 

By looking at Damien Hirst's work, there is no beauty in a traditional sense but one can see there is a lot of scientific techniques.In my emphasis of this artwork, it is not particularly skillful nor rigorous. But regarding conceptual side it is there to be seen but the problem arises again when we factor in the morality of the medium he used to portray his concepts. At the end of the day, Damien Hirst's contemporary artwork succeeded in inciting our senses and emotions.