Damien Hirst: has shock art lost its bite?

It wasn’t your usual London street party. There were no children playing, Victoria sponges or Union Jack bunting. Instead, on this balmy early Nineties afternoon, a group of young artists were taking part in a bizarre get-together in Hoxton called A Fete Worse than Death.

At one stall, Tracey Emin did palm readings; at another, Gary Hume sold tequila slammers. Yet the most eye-catching contribution came from the ever-entrepreneurial Damien Hirst. Dressed in a clown’s costume, for 50p he offered passers-by a sneak peek of his testicles, which he’d spot-painted that morning.

Two decades and an estimated 215million later, over 300 of Hirst’s rather more respectable spot paintings are being shown worldwide at all 11 of Larry Gagosian’s art galleries. In April, he will be given a retrospective at Tate Modern, London’s flagship show during the Olympics. As the world turns its eyes on London, art’s biggest showman is taking centre stage. The clown, it seems, is having the last laugh.

Or is he? Sticking two fingers up at the establishment has of course become Hirst’s trademark. Nearly 25 years after the enterprising young Goldsmiths student staged a headline-grabbing show in a disused warehouse, and went on to exhibit a variety of pickled animals in various states of putrefaction, to say that he still divides opinion would be an understatement. “Detestable and f------ dreadful” is how the Evening Standard critic Brian Sewell described one recent show. “Simple-minded and sensationalist” is Australian critic Robert Hughes’s verdict on an entire career.

Then, last month, David Hockney entered the fray. According to the BBC’s Andrew Marr, when asked if a poster in his gallery reading, “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally”, was a sly dig at Hirst, Hockney nodded. Hockney has since denied attacking Hirst personally. Either way, art’s enfant terrible is more than used to swipes at his use of 160 “assistants” to execute his artistic ideas. As he himself said: “I only made five spot paintings myself… And the spots I painted are s----.” But Hockney went on to make a more telling point. “It’s a little insulting to craftsmen, skilful craftsmen…” he told Marr. “I used to point out at art school, you can teach the craft, it’s the poetry you can’t teach. Now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft.”

Is he right? Did “conceptual” art take such a stranglehold in Hirst and his compatriots’ wake that technique was sacrificed? Just what has Hirst’s influence been on British artists? And might there, finally, be a swing away from the form he made so famous and infamous all at once?

Hockney’s views are echoed by the artist George Shaw, who graduated from Hockney’s own alma mater, the Royal College of Art, in 1998. “I became incredibly frustrated at art school… that you needed a philosophical language to understand contemporary art, rather than a pictorial one,” he says. Shaw, 45, a painter in an old-school realist tradition, was Turner-nominated last year for his images of the Coventry housing estate he grew up on. For him, art is about works that “an art historian and his mother could both enjoy... But that wasn’t what [the tutors] were looking for.”

Many feel Shaw was scandalously overlooked for last year’s prize, losing out to installation artist Martin Boyce. But was it down to the Hirst effect? Certainly, there was already a well-established shift away from orthodox art education when Hirst arrived at Goldsmiths College in Camberwell in the late Eighties. In the Sixties – under the influence of minimalism and conceptualism – art schools nationwide had decided intellectual pursuits were as important as technical ones. Painting was dead, the US minimalist Donald Judd declared, and curating, theorising and art history soon became as important as draughtsmanship.

“Damien didn’t create this milieu, but he thrived in it,” says Michael Archer, director of Goldsmiths’ BA in fine art. And Hirst needed little encouragement from Goldsmiths’ Dean at the time, Jon Thompson, who led this break with tradition. “Our philosophy remains the same today,” Archer says. “We don’t break our course down into rigid components of compulsory disciplines.” But doesn’t this encourage following the path of least resistance? Who can be bothered with the 10,000 hours mastering their craft? “If a student wants to learn how to weave or weld, we have the staff to teach it,” he says. “But we don’t force them.”

The painter Gabriella Boyd, a recent graduate from Glasgow School of Art, can’t see what the fuss is about. “Drawing’s still taught and it’s still popular,” says the 24- year-old. “I used to love life-drawing class at college and I wasn’t the only one.” A quick look around Boyd’s website, indeed, is like being taken in a time-machine back to a Hockney show in the early Sixties.