Damien Hirst - Tate Modern

With a Damian Hirst exhibition you obviously go with pre-conceived notions, it's easy to jump on the conservative bandwagon and dismiss him but his work is interesting and profound, all about life & death and beauty, often represented by butterflies & ugliness, represented by cigarette butts. His most iconic work is probably the shark, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ although I prefer Pharmacy which reminds me of a Donald Judd minimalist piece. It is especially effective here as you enter it from a room kept humid to support butterflies flying around living out their life, you then progress from the heat of the butterfly room to the cool of Pharmacy, cool in both senses of the word.
  
'A Thousand Years' must also be mentioned. Within a glass box a life cycle is played out. Maggots hatch, develop into flies, then feed on a severed cow's head while other flies fly around and either meet their end in an insect-o-cutor or survive to continue the cycle. It's the artist playing God and it is amazing, horrific but amazing. The randomness of life and death, it seems so unfair, but that is how life and death works I suppose.

There's always going to be bits you don’t like as well. His spin paintings don’t do much for me and I didn’t bother with the diamond encrusted skull as there was a big queque and it's not my favourite. Without the artist the diamonds are still worth enough for an ordinary person to retire on whereas with the shark for example there is no value without Hirst’s creative flair and ideas.