Damien Hirst

The Damien Hirst's first major show for eight years, at the White Cube gallery in London.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK LAWSON:
Ian McMillan, some people think he's a God of modern art. Others wish he would get stuffed. Where do you stand?

IAN MCMILLAN:
I think he's a God. I think he's wonderful. This show spoke profoundly to me. It made me want to weep. It reminded me of my dad. My dad died a couple years ago. Those cabinets you see in people's rooms, it felt to me like that. There were a lot of rubber gloves involved, there was blood on the floor, there were these terrible surgical instruments. I felt as I walked around that it was speaking directly to me. You go up the stairs and find this box of pills. Like the box of pills that I had to organise for my dad and still have to organise for my mother. I've always thought those boxes of pills were a map of your life, that's what it was, from Monday to Friday, from day 1 to day 120, and you get right to the top. The other thing about the downstairs is you're looking in and there's yourself looking back. That's the amazing thing. McMillan looking back at himself. Not long to go, McMillan. It felt like that to me. Then you get upstairs and there's these completely black things that could be open cast mines. They're made out of flies and they don't look back at you. Then suddenly you look out the window and there's old Charity looking at us, condemning us all for not doing enough. It felt to me like Hirst was really plugging straight into me in this piece.

LISA JARDINE:
What Ian's just done is what Damien Hirst wants you to do. And what young British art asks you to do. It asks you to engage and it asks you to engage in your own terms. He comes of age in this exhibition because he takes his own themes that we've learned to respond to, the shark, the formaldehyde, the spiritual themes, he gave us the link between the spiritual and those physical objects. Now he modulates them into a rather more grown-up or you might say more limited domain. We're back with religion. It used to be philosophy. He started with philosophy, the big scale. Now we're back with the Catholic, the rituals of the Catholic faith. I think he has done something magnificent and I think Ian's response is exactly what he's aiming at.

LAWSON:
Michael Portillo, he's had more attention than any other young, modern British artist. Did you feel it was merited on this evidence?

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
I think his attention has been merited in the past. I wasn't sure that this represented so much of a step forward as the others seem to think. The items were very, very familiar. I mean, he actually bought a job lot of cows' heads back in 1994. He's been working on the same cows' heads ever since. They've now emerged as the Apostles and Jesus Christ. The question in my mind was whether that had been his original intention. He's known as a shockaholic. Or whether he thought that in the end, religion is the one thing that in the end could shock us? Certainly if it's interpreted as blasphemous, that will create a great deal of coverage. It's difficult to judge whether there is genuine artistic or genuine religious conviction. I will say what I thought was new and interesting was the symmetry of it all. It's beautifully laid out in the gallery. It does have wonderful symmetry. That raises the questions for me: This very, very revolutionary artist who again and again comes back to boxes and things that are symmetrical and cases and mirrors and very, very familiar and easy shapes.

LAWSON:
I thought The Charity was Hirst at his best. He has got this knack for striking visual images and it's very funny and its a good joke, as well. As Michael suggests, in the rest he's flogging a dead cow, isn't he? We've had so many cows.

JARDINE:
I think you might have that back to front. I think The Charity is cheap Hirst, cheap young British art. It's actually what allows people to put big pieces in their living room and say, "isn't that cute?" The cow's head used to shock and it doesn't shock anymore. If you go down to the Saatchi Gallery, really ordinary people are walking around being interested and not being shocked. So what he does here is he puts the flesh and the icons and the rituals back together - I mean I'm not a Catholic, and I imagine you have more understanding, Michael, of all of this iconography, but the iconography on its own is dull and old and finished. You put the flesh back with it and surely you give it something new.

LAWSON:
I'm a Catholic, and you can certainly see, it's very clear there the young boy in the church, looking up at these gruesome crucifixions, at the cross and that all comes out. There's also a possible connection with his recovery from addiction, although he won't confirm that. The thing that worried me about some of it, is that it is thematically interchangeable isn't it? If he told us these cows are the Manchester United football team or Tony Blair's Cabinet, we'd all go around saying, of course they are.

MCMILLAN:
Isn't that the marvellous thing about it? The cows have lost their ability to shock. Now they can become this universal metaphor. He can say "right they're Man United." That's why it spoke personally to me. Because somehow the cows, they don't make you recoil anymore. You think this is a cow in the same way someone might do a Virgin Mary. It's just part of the vocabulary that he uses. That's what excited me. The cow doesn't frighten me anymore. It's just a thing that he uses.

LAWSON:
Michael Portillo, whatever else you say, he clearly connects with the public. Its apparent from people going around this afternoon, he has that knack.

PORTILLO:
It looked like the King's Road had gone to Hoxton. It was full of dizzy blondes this afternoon. Another thing I'd like to mention is there's a representational painting which is quite unusual, a very beautiful painting of a dove. I thought that was interesting. There were two wonderful paintings of butterflies, which are absolutely gorgeous.

LAWSON:
Which also look like stained glass.

PORTILLO:
I thought they were nice. Just to return to The Charity, this piece which is a very, very large piece out in the square...

LAWSON:
The giant collecting tin.

PORTILLO:
The giant collecting tin for the Spastic Society as it used to be called, the little girl, someone was saying it was cute or innocent. I thought it was sort of verging on kiddie porn. This box has been violated, broken open and all the coins are out there. I was pretty disturbed by that.

JARDINE:
But you just did what Hirst was daring you to do, which is to refer to it as the box of the Spastic Society. That's the word we weren't supposed to say and that's what links with the cute girl.