The artist was notorious for being shocking, provocative and macabre… and that’s just his interviews
, greeting the journalist at the door draped in a towel. ‘I like taking my clothes off,’ he said later. An encounter with Hirst was something approached with trepidation: there were reports of ‘challenging’ behaviour; he had filled ainterviewer’s handbag with flies; there had been some ‘unpleasantness’ involving a rat, a rubber glove and an art critic. Brian Sewell advised against shaking his hand: ‘limp, damp and unpleasant’.
Hirst’s taste for provocation and the macabre started early, with a teenage preoccupation with ‘corpses, lesions and hospital waste’ that saw him collect pathology textbooks and steal a human ear from the morgue . Age hadn’t mellowed him: ‘I think I have become more yobbish.’ Although Hirst had refocused on spot and swirl paintings , the outré ideas kept coming. He wanted to ‘Get a dead dog in a gallery and just shoot it repeatedly’, was planning ‘four cows in no formaldehyde, rotting, fucking’ and even, with a human donor’s body, a ‘Minotaur in formaldehyde’, though he conceded that this presented some ‘logistical problems’.
The jury was out on whether Hirst’s ‘turbulent’ career would culminate in long-term renown and artistic immortality, for a man with ‘a romantic attachment to the idea of being an artist’, or whether shock would lose its power. The journalist risked a cheeky question: ‘Did he ever find himself tormented by the question: My God, is it all crap?’ ‘Of course,’ he said.
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