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Hirst generally produces six distinct categories of art. His tank pieces, labeled the Natural History Series, encompass a variety of dead animals preserved in much the same manner as the shark mentioned above, and consistently command high auction prices through the forced perception that they highlight the disparity between life and death, despite the fact that many replicas are produced and generally drivers of value like uniqueness are destroyed. His other categories produce much the same effect. The cabinet series encompass a collection of surgical tools or pill bottles in pharmacy medicine cabinets, as exampled by Blood of Christ or http://img.artknowledgenews.com/files2007a/DamienHirstLullabySpring.jpg or Lullaby Spring. His spot paintings have garnered a considerable amount of recognition, and consist of fifty or more multicolored circles on a white background--another supposed illusion to drugs, and easily mass produced by his army of assistants. His spin paintings involve Hirst spilling paint onto a revolving pottery wheel, and are so easily produced that Hirst has himself claimed that it is "impossible to make a bad one." Finally, Hirst's butterfly paintings are simply collages made of thousands of dismembered butterfly wings, again describing themes of life and death, and again easily produced in Hirst's factory setting.
Hirst's main dealerdealer White Cube has sold over four hundred spin and butterfly paintings and over six hundred spot paintings, and it is no surprise that Hirst is regularly shown in the Gagosian Gallery, another marketing genius concerned more with status, brand, and manipulation of buyer's test than actual inherent artistic value. Hirst's marketing prowess has begun to transcend the art world, as he has ventured into a recent clothing line, and opened a short-lived club in New York City. A telling anecdote involves a noted auction house rejected a piece involving Stalin, stating that they never deal in connotations of Stalin or Hitler, but when asked if there would be any interest in a piece of Stalin branded by Hirst, the auction house replied that they would then have to purchase the piece, due to the ensured value that the brand commands. All in all, the factory setting fully commercializes the art market, providing mass-produced artistic pieces carrying forced and arbitrary meaning into a gullible public consumer base easily swayed by marketing ability and the common "herd mentality." The combination of these factors threatens to replace true artistic value with mass consumer-manipulation and the destruction of traditional aesthetic qualities of art. http://whitecube.com/artists/damien_hirst/