This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

As far as I can tell, here’s what happened. Last year, a teenager calling himself (or possibly herself) Cartrain made some collages that included images of work by artist Damian Hirst. Somehow or other, they ended up on the 100artworks site. Hirst was not amused.

Hirst alerted the Design and Artists Copyright Society, which is the mechanism by which artists in the UK get paid for their intellectual property. The DACS took legal advice (I assume) and had solicitors’ letters sent to 100artworks, which capitulated and (oddly, to my eyes) handed over the original artwork to the DACS.

At the time the Daily Mail (credibility warning) claimed that Hirst had threatened to sue Cartrain, which doesn’t square with Cartrain’s own version of the story now, and indeed the final paragraphs of its story, as so often with the Mail, contradicts the screaming headline. The Mail also says Hirst’s intention was to recoup his royalty percentage from the proceeds from the sales on 100artworks, which would presumably have been a small sum.

“The legal grounds in which Hirst requested the artworks are very questionable” according to a statement that appears to be written by Cartrain, although it refers to him in the third person. However, as far as I’m aware the ruling has not been challenged.

So the story ended, until July this year when Cartrain walked into the Tate Britain gallery and stole a packet of pencils from Damien Hirst’s installation Pharmacy. Cartrain then posted up mock-up ransom demands, stating that the pencils would be returned if Hirst gave him his artworks back. It’s not clear to me that Hirst has the artworks (the action was taken by the DACS) but perhaps he does.

Shortly afterwards, the police arrested Cartrain for theft and criminal damage: theft of the pencils, which turn out to be an extremely rare set of pencils worth half a million quid (yes, I’m gobsmacked too) and damage to a large artwork by a world-famous artist, the whole of which is valued at ten million (seems not unlikely).

The little media and blogging coverage this story has received so far has been predictable. Nobody in the middlebrow world of mainstream journalism likes Hirst because nobody in that world likes conceptual art. They do like Banksy and his imitators, of which Cartrain appears to be one, because it’s art they understand, and it makes the gentrified bits of City fringe they live in (or pretend they live in) seem edgy and arty and exciting. In any story that features Hirst or (worse!) Sarah Lucas or Tracy Emin, the artist is likely to be the enemy. The attitude is the same as when The Sun screamed “What a Load of Rubbish” at Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII.

So The Indie goes with Hirst’s vicious feud over a box of pencils. Twitter has picked it up, mostly with retweets of uncharacteristically vacuous remarks by Ben Goldacre, Charlie Brooker and Peter Serafinowitz (all people whose work I usually like). The tone has universally been dominated by the following observations:

• Damien Hirst is rich, and doesn’t need any more money
• Damien Hirst’s art isn’t any good
• Modern art is rubbish anyway
• Who would pay £500,000 for a box of pencils LOLZ

Let’s deal with these one by one. First, Hirst does not stand to get any money. The charges are criminal, meaning we’d expect any fine to be paid to the crown, not to Hirst, at least assuming he doesn’t have to replace the pencils. To be clear: there’s no way Cartrain is going to have to pay £500k or £10m, much less pay them to Hirst.

Second, whether Hirst’s art is good or not is not the same as whether or not you like it. The question of how art can be judged is an extremely vexed one, and judgements are often revised, again and again, over the course of time. It seems to me to be largely a social and cultural construction, but that’s just my view. If you don’t like an artist’s work, that doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t protect it from being vandalised or, indeed, to go back to the previous case, from being ripped off.

Third, yes, many people dislike conceptual art, and many people dislike all art that isn’t pictures of horses. That’s fine. It doesn’t mean the art is rubbish. Maybe people who think Hirst is rubbish are wrong, and all those people who know a lot about art are right. Just maybe. But even if (as I think) there’s no right and wrong in such arguments, the law doesn’t and shouldn’t care.

Fourth, only an idiot would pay £500k for a box of pencils. But there are idiots. If that’s what they’d cost to replace, that’s how much you stole. The claim that I thought the new BMW was worthless when I jacked it isn’t a defense I can use in court.

It seems to me that Florence Waters in the Telegraph is the only one so far who’s taken a breath here and seen the stunt for what it is. Cartrain’s excitable statement refers to a (fictional, so far as I can see) “feud between the two artists”. It lists the newspapers that carried the original story. It claims that “[t]he urban art communities are currently heavily debating the actions of Cartrain”. I say this smells strongly like a PR stunt by a naive teenager who wants a career as an artist, and the stunt has gone wrong.

Well, I hate to state the obvious, but stealing from a national gallery and damaging a major work of art are fairly serious criminal acts. That what makes them edgy and stuff; if you can’t do the time, don’t do the art crime. Reardless of the rights and wrongs of the original case, I suspect this has more to do with Cartrain’s thirst for celebrity status than with the evils of Hirst and the British art establishment

[UPDATE 20090908: Fixed Tate Modern / Tate Britain error (see comments)]