Why cunts sell shit to fools - Damien Hirst Page 1 of 7

Damien Hirst

Texts: Why cunts sell shit to fools

Damien Hirst , 2004

Adam and Eve Towards the End (2004). Installation shot In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,
Tate Britain, 2004. Photographed by Stephen White Damien Hirst and Science
Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012.

Here is a perfect example of a successful communication

between consumer and manufacturer, although why am I
left with a feeling that the letter actually went in the bin?
Its more than just because Im a cynical @!%&

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Forgive me if I wander from the subject or rant: its all part

of the piece and it is by its very nature a wandering piece.
Oh, and if you could hang on in there and read beyond the
wearing and bad grammar and punctuation...

So money is a tool. It works like a key, and you run into

problems when the tool is over-worshipped. Its lower
function can be forgotten (opening the !@$%&*! door). You
wouldnt keep a screwdriver in your pocket so long that
you forgot its function but I know plenty of people who do
that with money. No sit back down, no, no, no, Ill get
these. Put your wallet away, you get the next one. Come on
love Ive already done it its not about money. So its not
about money? Thats a good one! Weve established that
much. Discount? Dont talk to me about discounts, Im just
NOT !@$%^&! BUYING IT AND THATS THAT! Moneys the
key and without money, the cunts wouldnt be able to sell
shit to us fools but do you know what? They fucking would.
Theyre such cunts that they would find a way.

Ive always said that art is about life and the art world is
about money although the buyers and sellers, the movers
and shakers, the money men will tell you anything to not
have you realise that their real motivation is cash, because
if you realise that they would sell your granny to Nigerian
sex slave traders for fifty pence (ten bob) and a packet of
woodbines then youre not gonna believe the other shit
coming out their mouths thats trying to get you to buy the
garish shit theyve got hanging on the wall in their posh
shops.

Anyway, the bullshit is in any business, all businesses. I

mean, whats the difference between an art dealer and art;
a car dealer and cars; a drug dealer and drugs; a politician
and politics? The four are the same !@$%! things and the
list dont end there. Most of the time they are all selling
shit to fools and its getting worse. They may tell us that
what we are buying into is not transport but
transportation but were beginning to realise that its just
not getting us from A. to B. any more and were doing
nothing as usual except @$%$! moanin. I suppose if we
accept that the cunts rule the world, then weve got to take
the collapse of quality in the time of the cunts as a given,
and also we need to discover the reasons for the rise of the
cunt (because someone took their eye off the ball,
mentioning no names but av a look in the mirror). In the

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music industry its probably more noticeable than in other

creative industries. The main reason for this is that people
in the business who have the most control are the furthest
away from creativity (how dumb). A friend of mine in a well
known band was even asked to sign a contract that said he
wasnt allowed to change style! Can you imagine the
Beatles signing a contract like that in 1961 (I guess thats
about where we are now musically). Special offer! Ill give
you a special offer suck my cock, yeah, yeah, yeah,
special offer everything must go! Closing down sale now
on! $@! off now and you wont get punched! yeah,
theres a special offer in my underpants all you can eat
for 2.99.

I remember a joke when I was at school. Two kids are

playing shops and using leaves as money and one kid says
to the other how much for that flower and the other kid
says 50 leaves and the first kid says do you think money
grow on trees! Its a bit like the one about the two art
dealers in bed gently touching each other and gazing
longingly into each others eyes and one says to the other
urgently, turn over and the other says, about 12.8 million
last year, how about yourself? (And you say its not about
money).

The origins of money exchange and swapping. Two

farmers, one with a field of wheat, the other with sheep in
his field: they will always find a way to end up taking cold
lamb sandwiches to work on a Monday morning. Its the
way the universe works. Bartering came before money, then
I guess it was only a matter of time before in walked some
cunt. I cant believe it was that simple. This cunt starts
throwing the idea of money around to fill in that gap
between the lambs being slaughtered and the wheat being
ground into flour. You get the drift, yeah thats right, being
able to buy things out of season, something with value that
you can save without the inconvenience of scraping pounds
of rotting lamb out of your pockets on a Friday night,
something small and convenient that wont perish, and
bosh, weve got a banker and then a bank, and then
several banks and insurance and loans and it seems like a
good idea at first but its happened. Now the value of our
goods has been handed over to a third party. Of course
theyve got our best interests at heart but as always
happens with money (oops), I mean money, greed sets in
and possession is nine tenths of the law they (the cunts)

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say. And guess wot? Theyve got our monet, even worse,
we gave them our money! So when its been in their pocket
for a while, whose money is it? Is it still more ours than
theirs? Sometimes I ^%$%@! hate money. This never
happened with cave painting. Look you make it, I sell it,
dont tread on my toes. Its your own fault, so dont be a
fool and stop buying shit from these cunts!

The Holy Trinity, the Three Stooges, cars, refrigerators,

light-bulbs: all designed apparently to fuck up. And you can
add CDs to the list, do I remember being sold the idea of
CDs being indestructible? Yes I think I do. I remember
seeing a guy on TV telling me that you could drill a 5mm
hole through a CD and it would still work! What bullshit the
cunts fed us, but we ate it, we deserve the blame
wholeheartedly.

Or as Dino Felluga says, Exchange-value: according to

Karl Marx, the entrance into capitalist culture meant that
we ceased to think of purchased goods in terms of use-
value, in terms of the real uses to which an item will be
put. Instead, everything began to be translated into how
much it is worth, into what it can be exchanged for (its
exchange value). Once money became a universal
equivalent, against which everything in our lives is
measured, things lost their material reality (real-world uses,
the sweat and tears of the labourer). We began even to
think of our own lives in terms of money rather than in
terms of the real things we hold in our hands: how much is
my time worth? How does my conspicuous consumption
define me as a person? As the things we use are
increasingly the product of complex industrial processes,
we lose touch with the underlying reality of the goods we
consume. A common example of this is the fact that most
consumers do not know how the products they consume
are related to real life things. How many people could
identify the actual plant from which is derived the coffee
bean? Starbucks, by contrast, increasingly defines our
urban realities. Conceptual point re Karl Marx value and
functionality: the interesting thing about art and its value is
that it is precisely because art has no physical function that
causes its value to be so suspected, so speculative. This
drives people crazy who sets the value, where did the
value come from, why can I not see the direct correlation
between function and price, it is all a Machiavellian plot by
some shady art dealer... and so on.

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Yeah cars, what a tragic, sad, fucking horrific, wasteful,

money-grabbing, planet-destroying piece of corporate shit
weve bought into there (actually, I am not arrogant enough
to believe that the human race has, will have, or ever has
had, the power to destroy the planet, although my girlfriend
Maia probably would rightly want to question that. My
arrogance that is). Im putting in another fuckin quote now.
It relates somehow to the subject and I could wait all day
for a nice place to put it for you but Im gonna use it now,
to relieve the monotony of my relentless psycho-babble in
my search for truth. You can work out how to work it into
the subject, its about time you did something anyway, got
off your arse! Its sitting on your arse that got us in this
situation in the first place.

The easiest way to attract a crowd, Houdini wrote, is to

let it be known that at a given time and a given place
someone is going to attempt something that in the event of
failure will mean sudden death. Myths are often about the
inescapable, about the painful discovery of powerful
constraints. They dont tend to be stories about people
who get away with things, but rather stories about people
who try to; people whose transgressions turn out to be a
lesson for us all. Oedipus, Prometheus, Narcissus and
Antigone all, in their different ways, suffer the most violent
of all sentimental educations. That there must be some
things that no creature can elude whether they be laws
(natural or moral), desires (variously deemed moral or
immoral), or biological limits (the need to breathe, eat and
die) and that they must be discovered, recognised and
observed are integral to our sense of ourselves, and the
ways in which we question who we are. When a constraint
can be described as something else when the earth
becomes round so we cant fall off it, when the notion of
sin is seen as a devious form of social control, and so on
we change our place in the world. When a constraint can
be re-described it can make the world, the way things are
despite our intentions seem more robust, more solid. Quote
sources? From a book on Houdini. Ill find it soon! Its like
the rise of Ginsters and other purveyors of shit food how
did that happen? How did we let it happen? (Their new ads
in service station feature the bare-faced lie, Real Honest
Food). Youre wedged up and yer looking good and looking
for a good buy? You wanna SPEND SPEND SPEND!? Ill
give you a good-bye, fuck off an wash yer ears, get down

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the nearest art school and buy with your eyes, not your
ears.

Or, a little bit of advice if you want to buy for

investment, dont bother! Buy gold, but even thats dodgy.
Buy plutonium or genes, they tell me thats where the big
money of tomorrow is today. Or nuclear waste, dont they
call it re-processing now? Yeah! Shit and mess on a big
scale. Anything like that is probably a good investment.
Better than diamonds or gold or even cash. Money under
the beds no good anymore. Its not safe and they keep re-
designing it. Is it getting smaller or is it me? Buying
something because you like it is the best investment
anyone can make.

So where the %$@! are we now? Ill explain the story so far
for the slow to catch on:

The reason why cunts sell shit to fools is two-fold, with a

third point three elements 0 cunts, shit and fools. (1.)
Because the fools behave like they are supposed to like
fools!

(2.) Because of (1.) then the cunts come out of the

woodwork and make a killing!

But thats not the whole of the story, this scenario points
(1.) and (2.) work together as a force (3.). Which in turn
creates a decline in quality, this is the shit in why cunts
sell shit to fools.

Hopefully that will wrap the whole thing up even for the
hard of hearing and the infirm amongst you. Its your own
fault, youre buying it. Stop buying it and theyll stop sellin
it. They might be the cunts but theyre into money! And if
this rant feels too true, too close for comfort, and the irony
dont float your boat, and youre the kind of person that
needs hope, all I know is this: there are no pockets in a
shroud!

The tragedy of the world is that the good cant be bothered

and the bad can.

This essay was first published in the Idler magazine. It was

then republished in Gregor Muir and Damien Hirst, Angus

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Fairhurst, Sarah Lucas, 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' (Tate

Publishing, 2004).

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