fce reading about artists

0 open-air consert

jazz

1

ballet

music

2

singer

house

3

sculpture

statue

4 portrait

art

5 abstract

priceless

6 detective

historical

The most successful living artist

Have you ever thought, 'I wish I could be an artist'? Don't give up hope. Damien Hirst nearly failed his art A Level at school and his work now sells for millions.

Controversial British painter Damien Hirst is generally considered to be the most successful artist alive, thanks to the huge prices paid for his work. Hirst changed the face of contemporary art in the 1990s with his Natural History series, in which dead animals are preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in glass cases.

The first of these, his four-metre shark entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, fetched an incredible £6.5 million when it was sold to an unnamed American collector 1. After that came a string of similarly provocative works, which included a pickled lamb in Away from the Flock, as well as dissected cows and rotting animal carcasses.

2. Animal rights activists objected strongly to his Amazing Revelations, a triangular collage made of thousands of dismembered butterfly wings. In 1994, Away from the Flock became the focus of attention when Mark Bridger, an artist from Oxford, poured black ink into the tank containing the dead lamb. However, Bridger claimed he was contributing to the artwork, not protesting against it and he renamed it Black Sheep.

The controversy surrounding Hirst's work inevitably raises the question of whether or not it constitutes art. For some, there is absolutely no doubt: he has been described as 'a genius' and 'a pioneer of the British art movement'. Others have a very different view. When Hirst won the prestigious Turner prize in 1995, a Conservative politician writing in The Sun newspaper asked: 'Have they gone stark raving mad?'3.

But there are also many people within the art world who have attacked and ridiculed the artist, accusing him of producing work which is exaggerated and silly. 4. He, too, has used the word 'silly' to describe his spin paintings, a series of works created by dropping paint onto a spinning canvas. 'You do turn round after a few years and look at your stuff and you think it's embarrassing,' he confessed at an exhibition in 2005. 'Certainly everything you make is not a masterpiece.'

He also freely admits to using assistants to do most of his spot-paintings, which consist of rows of randomly coloured dots. Of the 500 or more such works produced, he is said to have painted only five himself. 5. And indeed, there is nothing new about artists getting others to do some of the work for them: Rembrandt, for example, had very large workshops with pupils to help him, and they had to pay for the privilege.

In recent years Hirst has branched out and taken on new challenges. He has made short films, opened a restaurant, set up a publishing! company and even recorded a pop music single. 6. But of course, it is his art for which he will be best remembered, and like it or not, it continues to sell.