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This video expands on clips of art critic Robert Hughes critiquing two of Damien Hirst’s works in the documentary “Mona Lisa Curse,” which has been removed from YouTube under the pretext of copyright infringement. All such segments from the documentary have also been removed. I’m able to get around that by using heavy and creative editing to thwart the algorithm from automatically discovering the content and automatically taking it down, and I also strictly follow copyright guidelines so that if the BBC finds out I used their content, they don’t have a real case to take it down. The law permits using segments for educational purposes, and I provide a lot of my own commentary. This is the second video I’ve made sharing Hughes’s no-holds-barred take on extremely overrated artists, the former being Andy Warhol. My impetus for doing them is to resurrect Hughes’s criticism, which is slowly being whitewashed from art history in favor of ever more thinly veiled promotion of art commodities in the market masquerading as art criticism.

If you want to watch it in YouTube click here: https://youtu.be/ESleQV3FEYA

A decade ago, Hughes’s outspoken commentary could easily be found online without even trying to look for it. You could just type Warhol, Hirst, or Koons in the YouTube search bar, and his videos and excerpts thereof would appear high in the rankings. But that is no longer the case for his last documentary, in which he savages what big money has done to the art world and those behind it, including collectors and auction houses, as well as a few artists who became super rich by taking advantage of the system while producing threadbare art. Hughes contends that the art world has been destroyed.

If you don’t know the documentary “The Mona Lisa Curse” exists and don’t know what’s in it, you will never find it. The full documentary can be found on Vimeo here, and a site that hosts documentaries called Watch Documentaries here. However, on Vimeo, the film has 12.1k views and 24 likes (the other site doesn’t show the view count). Well, my video has 13k views after 3 days, so that should tell you how incredibly rare it is for someone to find the documentary. In effect, it’s been erased. That, by the way, is how censorship has worked in recent years. You don’t fully block something when drastically limiting its audience works just as well in the grand scheme.

Both my videos in this series (there will be one more for Koons) are among my best, and I’ve gotten better at being succinct, and of course, my creative experiments with the medium of video abound. I can easily spend hours on a section that is less than a minute. I am finding video-making a satisfying artform in its own right.

~ Ends

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7 replies on “New Video: Art Critic Slams Hirst”

  2. This is an excellent video – thank you so much for putting it together, and the other on Robert Hughes. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know Hughes was an art critic. I only knew him from ‘The Fatal Shore’ and then only decades ago when I read it. I’ve now seen both your videos with him and it inspired me to go hunting the Mona Lisa Curse documentary.

    If you don’t mind me commenting, I found two maybe useful things. First, as you said, there are two places to see it. However, I think it’s only the one source. The Watch Documentaries site has Vimeo underneath it – it may be if you remove the Vimeo, the other goes too. So maybe someone who finds it ought to capture it, stick it on a USB stick and share it around like ‘The Grasshopper Lies Heavy’ (or something). Archive.org also has a version when I searched for it.

    The second thing is that it seems the documentary was made by Oxford Films and Televison, UK, but not I think for the BBC. It was made for Channel 4 (which you can tell also in the link to the second part, and also the intermittent title cards for ad breaks, which C4 has, and the BBC doesn’t): https://oftv.co.uk/work/mona-lisa-curse/.
    There also appears to have been a DVD of it, but I don’t know where to buy that.
    Here’s a Worldcat entry on the formats for it: https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/826372754.

    But it’s fascinating how… disconnected the documentary is from easily-accessible culture, even though Hughes is easily accessible. Wikipedia has no entry on it that I can find, but it clearly is mentioned in entries related to it (here’s what comes up when you search Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=mona+lisa+curse&title=Special%3ASearch&ns0=1). It isn’t listed under Hughes’ IMDB entry (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0400889/) but does have its own entry (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1586000/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1). When you search for it on Channel 4, you get the 1980’s film Mona Lisa, but not it.

    This could be interpreted as some kind of conspiracy of suppression, and certainly art dealers and other monied folk in that area won’t be encouraged by its content to promote it. However, I wonder is it also timing – it’s just before the credit crunch, when many things went sideways. (Not just timing, but it might have amplified the amnesia). For example, the documentary mentions plans to franchise out the Louvre and other galleries to other countries (‘The Louvre of the Desert’) – something that seems, from a bit of research, to have never ended up happening….

    Finally, that person with all the Warhol art: how incredibly direct he is about it all, how confident and certain he is about the logic of his evaluation of its worth. ‘In the end, it’s money’. U-huh. Sure – but why do people pay this kind of money? After seeing Hughes dismantle his perspective on why some art is valuable, I was left wondering if the reason this documentary isn’t easy to find is because it could significantly damage art prices. I suddenly wondered – as I did after your excellent videos that brought me here – ‘wait, why do I care that these people think this work is worth that much? Would I pay that for it?’ It’s liberating

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    1. Thanks for all the info and analysis. As with so many things today, one can’t know the truth. We can have suspicions and hunches. In this case, I think there’s so much money in art that there’s an incredibly strong urge to control the narrative, and Hughes in that documentary was anything but good for publicity for the art world. That’s the same general hunch lots of people have.

      Right, the video was produced by Oxford Films. Both they and the BBC were listed as blocking content from the film on copyright grounds.

      Anyway, so glad you enjoyed my videos. I’m going to do part 3 about Jeff Koons later this month.

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      2. Of course, it doesn’t go so well for Koons, either. I have a lot myself to say about Koons. I’m looking forward to doing that video. Right now I’m working on one about Duchamp that’s long overdue.

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