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Damien Hirst and his friend, the writer Gordon Burn, provide in On the Way to Work a fascinating window into the mind of one of the most successful artists of our day. The book, beautifully produced, illustrated and typeset, is a collection of interviews spanning the eve of Hirst's first major exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1991 to ones conducted late in 2000. While the book is certainly skewed towards the later years (one interview in January 1992, one in April 1996, three in 1999 and seven in 2000) the reader does get a broad overview of how Hirst's relationships to life, art and money have progressed. Hirst's fame, his spearheading of the YBA (Young British Artists) phenomenon and his subsequent exposure in the gossip columns with the well documented, and inevitable, drug and drink stories, are all fully covered here. But it is Hirst's profound artistic imagination and insight that best come over: his obsession with death--and with needing to prove his talent as a way to be immortalised in order to escape death--and his ambivalence towards art (the kind of ambivalence much of the public itself exhibits towards modern art) are key here. Also illuminating is Hirst's respect and admiration toward Francis Bacon and our discovery of his skill as a raconteur. If most visual artists show a disappointing inability to discuss their creations, Hirst at least shows an enviable ability to tell a divertingly good story. Hirst, candidly, sees the art world as already always part of the work, and space, of art and it is a part he sometimes enjoys, sometimes struggles with and whose successes he has rightly benefited from. In 1996 Hirst displayed the body of cow cut up and suspended in 12 vitrines. The piece was called, "Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything": Hirst seems to have decided that the inevitablity of death, so futilely hidden by a society obsessed with youth and health, is the only truth or rather, perhaps, the only incisive fact the knowledge of which may help us to fully live now and eschew those lies in which we all swim and in which we are always in danger of drowning. On The Way to Work is an excellent book and much recommended to anyone who has been fascinated by the sudden rise in the visibility of modern art and what this has to say about society at the beginning of the 21st century. --Mark Thwaite
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