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Episode Transcript - Sharks and the Philharmonic (1/28/2008)

If you walk past the Lever House at Park Avenue and 54th, especially at night, you will be confronted with a strange sight. The whole lobby is bathed in fluorescent light; it rather looks like a morgue. The reason being that there are thirty dead sheep, one dead shark, two sides of beef, three hundred sausages, a chair, a dead dove, a medicine cabinet, lots of wires and ducts (haven't been so many ducts since the movie "Brazil"), all the dead animals are in formaldehyde: it looks like a morgue. This is, of course, a work by your favorite artist, Damien Hirst, called "School: Anthology of Lost Dreams." Now Damien Hirst is a beloved target of art critics and general right-wing moral guardians; he's considered decadent, he's considered sensationalist, he's considered careerist, his piece before it opened was called "a stunt" in The New York Times. In that sense he reminds one of Jeff Coons a bit, although Coons is a lot cuter (in terms of his works) and perhaps of the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, who was similarly formalist and cold.

I found the thing very striking, especially, as I say, at night. Passersby were utterly bemused, horrified, or scornful. I think it's kind of interesting, it's kind of creepy, but I'm willing, as I usually am with artists whom others consider to be trying to provoke the bourgeoisie for personal careerist reasons. I am personally sympathetic to it, and interested in it.

Early this past month, I was at a concert at Avery Fisher Hall, and I was listening to Lorin Maazel conduct and I thought of Damien Hirst and his installation at the Lever House. Now you may wonder why, and the answer is that, although Maazel is attacked by his detractors as eccentric and willful and mannered and so forth, although everyone concedes his technical brilliance that he gets from the orchestra, but the primary adjective used to describe him is "cold," maybe even "creepy," but "cold" for sure. And in that sense, this cold, clinical quality reminded me a little bit of Damien Hirst.

It was particularly evident in the opening piece on the concert, which was Mendelssohn's "Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream." Now this is the most charming, magical music composed when Mendelssohn was seventeen, I think, years old, or maybe fifteen (God knows which) and just sparkling with fairy magic and charm and sort of sweet rusticity. And Maazel's performance with the New York Philharmonic sounded like a Hummer, attacking this defenseless little creature. It wasn't helped by the somewhat brutal acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall, which can be controlled, but Maazel did not choose to control them.

Nonetheless, for me it was an offensive performance. I didn't find the Hirst thing offensive; I found it kind of icily amusing. But this wasn't amusing at all. This was just a hammering of what should be, and usually is, gorgeous magic.

Right after the overture, came a young German violinist named Vivianne Hagner, who played the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Now, of young German violinists, Julia Fisher has gotten a lot of ink and rightly so; she's very good. But I must say Vivianne Hagner, for me, was the best young female German violinist that I have heard in a long time. She really played beautifully. But more to the point, she humanized Maazel. In other words, suddenly the conducting became sympathetic, modest, deferential to her lead, warm. It was a really interesting switch.

Now, I don't have any idea what Damien Hirst's personal life is, but maybe he needs a woman in his life, like Vivianne Hagner. I don't mean a domestic partner, I mean someone who could humanize him, a kind of female muse. But then again, maybe that's pure sexism. What I do know is that Vivianne Hagner humanized a cold Lorin Maazel who needed to be humanized, whereas Damien Hirst was just out there as a cold, clinical artist, and pretty strangely exciting as such.

This is John Rockwell for Rockwell Matters.

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