Wreck or revival? Damien Hirst’s new show in Venice divides the critics
Exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable has been 10 years in the making, and creates a vast world of supposedly salvaged artefacts. But not everyone is impressed with the massive undertaking
Damien Hirst is back, and the art world doesn’t know what to make of the latest grandiose exhibition from the crown prince of contemporary art.
To run until December, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable plunges visitors into a fantasy universe raised from the depths of the Indian Ocean that has been 10 years in the making.
And as ever with the 51-year-old Briton, famed for his stuffed sharks and the huge fortune he has amassed as the most commercially successful member of the Young British Artist movement (YBA) of the 1990s, it is nothing if not controversial.
Depending on which critic you listen to, the vast exhibition – spread across the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana halls of Venice’s old customs house – is either a spellbinding return to form, or a career-ending artistic shipwreck.
The two-site exhibition asks visitors to buy into a story about Hirst being alerted to a shipwreck discovered off east Africa in 2008 and organising the recovery of the treasures it contained.