egyptology anew:

damien hirst, ancient

egypt and the big money

JOHN MATEER
I think you have begun with the final act, my dear.
Lucian Freud to Damien Hirst
THE STORY
Everyone knows the story of the Golden Calf.
Moses had been summoned up Mount Sinai
in what is still now far eastern Egypt, and
while he is gone the Children of Israel start
questioning their faith. Feeling that it might
be safest to return to the religion of the country
theyd just left, a call is made for the gold
jewellery the women had carried with them.
From the metal an idol is fashioned that they
worship, until Moses, descending the mountain

catches sight of them, throwing down the

stone tablets bearing the recently received
Ten Commandments. As every child who has
attended Sunday School knows, this is a lesson
about behaviour in the absence of the Father,
about the temptation to indulge in the familiar
instead of trusting in the imminence of the
moral. Of course, that it is a calf is keythe
idol is not even of a human-like god!

It is this story that the provocative
artist Damien Hirst was more than alluding
to when he showed a sculpture of that name
in his now infamous, straight-to-auction
exhibition Beautiful in my Head Forever; more

than alluding, because the entire event was as

excessive as it could be, using all the tricks of
shock and strategy that he had learn over the
course of his two decades as the enfant terrible
of the Young British Art movement.1 The twoday auction resulted in sales over 111 million.
Even the automation of the financial industry
seemed part of the excess of this event, with
the collapse of the global economy, precipitated
by the losses of various USA banks, beginning,
literally, the next day. The centrepiece of this
uncanny auction, which even included a kind
of unicorn, was Hirsts The Golden Calf. In a
later monograph a critic wrote:

19

Undoubtedly intended for the cameras, to

be an icon of the entire bizarre venture of the
auction, The Golden Calf was also a kind of
tabloid-friendly admission of guiltHirst,
it could seem, was parodying his own greed
and parodying the entire high-end artworld.
He was cashing out just before the walls of
Casino Capitalism were about to come down.
Even the name he gave to the auction Beautiful
in my Head Forever echoes the live-fast-dieyoung aesthetic he shares with the other artstars of his generation, among them Tracey
Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Sue Noble and
Tim Webster.

In the midst of this bizarre theatre
something else was going on. This particular
incarnation of the Golden Calf was not as
random as it seemed. Certainly it was not
as random as its description by the above critic,
who was writing in the book accompanying
Hirsts first and vast retrospective at his
exhibition at Tate Modern, which was sponsored
solely by the Qatar Museums Authority,3 and on
for the duration of the London Olympics, later
travelling to Doha.4 The critic was not alone in
failing to realise that Hirsts Golden Calf was in
fact a gilded version of one of the most famous
images of Ancient Egypt, the Apis Bull. He was
not alone in that, as I havent found a single
text that has remarked on the iconology of
Hirsts work. Despite the extreme obviousness
of almost every aspect of Beautiful in my Head
Forever, excepting perhaps the logic of the
purchasers, it appears no-one was looking
at the sculpture itself, nor asking whether the
object was suggestive of something beyond
the either-or reactions of the mediatised
event. Hirsts ability to be divisive was so
successful that contemplation, something
usually synonymous with art, was completely
forgotten.

for artists. Perhaps the paintings that most

famously depict the scene of the worshipping of
the Golden Calfeven if the nature of worship
is unclear in Biblical accountsare Claude
Lorrains Landscape with the Adoration of the
Golden Calf (1653) in the Manchester Art Gallery
and Nicholas Poussins Adoration of the Golden
Calf (1636-37) in Londons National Gallery.
These works, both housed in major British
museums couldnt have been unknown to Hirst.
In comparing them, it is clear that both Lorrain
and Poussin made very particular decisions
readings we might sayin creating the
iconicity of their golden calves. Lorrains small
idol on a plinth reveals a due consideration
of the origin of the gold, even as it creates an
ideal, classical scene: the statue is small enough
to allow us to imagine that it might have been
formed out of bits of metal gathered from the
Israelities. Whereas Poussins calf, standing on a
substantial plinth like a Greco-Roman sculpture,
while in the foreground the Israelites dance
around in a light-hearted bacchanal, is almost
an hallucination of gold, a figure of imagined
excess. How could that have been made while
Moses was up the mountain! The work derives
its composition, in part, from a 1519 fresco of
the same name by the school of Raphael in the
Vatican.

The resemblance Poussins calf
bears to Hirsts sculpture and to the Apis Bull is
what led me to the subject of this investigation.
Why had no-one remarked on the possibility
that Hirsts The Golden Calf originated in an
image from Ancient Egypt? I wondered why
it was that Poussin had based his idol on the
well-known Egyptian god, why he had figured
the bull quite specifically and yet had refrained
from placing a sign of the moon on its head.
It is that lunar sign referring to the cult figure
that makes Hirsts work an irrefutable evocation
of that Egyptian tradition. Of course, the
iconicity of Ancient Egyptian art neednt
be immediately apparent to everyone who
sees Hirsts work. Yet it is extraordinary,
considering the amount of public attention
given to his Golden Calf, that even the authors
of commissioned texts for substantial books
on his work failed to consider its lineage,
it specificity.

EARLIER PAINTINGS
As an allegory of the human tendency to return
to familiar, material patterns of thinking instead
of adhering to the immaterial laws, the Golden
Calf has long been a popular tale and subject

THE APIS BULL

The Apis Bull was first discovered by a French
archaeologist in Serapeum, Saqqara, in 1850.
There were several cults dedicated to gods
who took their earthly form as bulls, but it

At the centre of this unifying sensibility

was The Golden Calfa formalehydedipped bull, whose horns and hooves were
cast in 18-carat gold and whose head was
topped with a solid-gold disc. While the
work directly referenced the Bible, its effect
could be likened to Ancient Minoan or
Assyrian sculpture.2

c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 3 . 3 2 014

was the Apis cult that was most widespread

and important, having its heyday in the late
Dynastic (664-332 BC) and Ptolemaic periods
(332-304 BC), and lasting until 365 AD.5 There
were two other major bull cults: Mnevis, the
sacred animal of the god of Heliopolis, and
Buchis of Armant, an animal connected to the
Gods Ra and Montu. Some Egyptologists see
the origin of these cults in earlier fertility
worship. In the case of the Apis Bull, it is
believed that it was only later in the history
of the cult that the animal became seen as an
embodiment of the creator god Ptah.

The Apis bulls were chosen through
a process of identification, in which certain
physical marks were key: a light triangle on
their forehead, a certain pattern on their back,
double hairs on their tails and a scarab-like
mark on the tongue. Once chosen, the Bull was
installed by means of a sacred ceremony, after
which it lived a luxurious life in a shelter with
a window, through which it could be seen by
the public and it even had a harem of cows.
It is thought that the Apis Bull functioned as
an oracle whose predictions were determined
by the interpretation of its movements. Simply
being in its presence could bestow on one
additional virility.

Hirsts depiction of the Golden
Calf as the Apis Bull goes far beyond the act
of alluding to the paintings of Claude Lorrain,
Nicholas Poussin and their precedent in the
Vatican, by making explicit the presumption
that the regression the Israelites at the foot of
Mount Sinai were guilty of was not only the
worship of an idol, but actually of a specific
idol, which meant they still accepted the power
of an Egyptian god, before their own immaterial
and all-mighty Lord. (None of Hirsts three
precedents adopts those distinguishing marks
that would irrefutably identify the Calf as
part of a specific cult.) Implicit in this, one can
assume, is the usual Judaic fear of unrestrained
sexuality, an element that is clearly illustrated in
Poussins work. According to Hirst the Golden
Calf is the Apis Bull, with his calf being entirely
modelled after figures of the Bull easily found
in many British museums. As is usual in his
practice, The Golden Calf is not really a sculpture,
rather the thing itself, a careful pickled animal,
augmented with real golden hooves and horns,
and the ornamental headdress.

It is striking that Hirsts interest
in the art of Ancient Egypt has drawn no
interest, because his long-standing fascination
with death and the preservation of flesh

egyptology anew: damien hirst, ancient egypt and the big money

London Underground advertisement

for Charles Saatchis
Be the Worst That You Can
Photo courtesy www.ravishlondon.com
http://www.ravishlondon.com/
items/(1481).html

is so much a part of the European idea of

Egyptian civilisation. Wandering through
his retrospective at the mausoleum-like Tate
Modern, through room after room containing
walls of cabinets with vials for pharmaceuticals
and of works that take decaying flesh as their
subject, it seemed to me that the magic he
wants his art to have is one that can bestow
not virility but immortality. It is as if Hirst has
always been aware of Herodotus observation
that; The Egyptians were the first people to put
forward a belief in the immortality of the soul.6
TOTEMS
To think that Hirsts concernif that word
could be applied to an artist like himmight
be with the historicity of the Egyptian image
is to misunderstand the originality of the
circumstance in which he is presenting his
works. It would be better to see The Golden Calf
as a symbolic repetition of one of his already
successful and archetypal worksthe famous
preserved tiger shark known as The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone
Living (1991). Like the shark, the Golden Calf
is an image of greed. It is similar to the shark
in another way, too, in that it represents a
surfacing from the depths. Whereas the shark
surfaces violently from the depths of an oceanic

subconscious, the Golden Calf arrives in the

bright light of day from the twilight world of
the Wests repressed memory of Egypt.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in
the Mind of Someone Living, Hirsts most famous
work, is a powerful precedent for The Golden
Calf, in that both can be seen as indicating the
peculiar nature of the iconor idolin the
contemporary art market and the broader world
of the media. Although Hirst, along with the
other London artists of his generation known
as the YBAs, was brought to global prominence
through the collecting of the advertising mogul
Charles Saatchi, it was this work that came to
stand for their collective audacity.7

What was this new, cool, British
audacity? It was the impulse to admit the crucial
role of money in every aspect of life to turn what
previously would have been seen as something
that might be crass, a source of embarrassment,
into something entertaining. In the case of
Hirsts shark, something museumological
became a thing at once immaterialart with
a capital Aand commercial. The animal
demonised through the movie Jaws had become
an emblem of neoliberal fun. Thanks to Hirst,
the tabloids, always so important in public
life in Britain, could simultaneous ridicule the
absurdity of High Art and celebrate the class

victory of a lad from Leeds. There is another

dimension to this that is more disturbing.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of
Someone Living was sold on auction, at its peak
price, for $US12 million to the USA collector
and hedgefund manager Steve Cohen. Cohen
kept it in his London office as a kind of trophy,
or hyper-capitalist memento mori. Writing
about seeing the work in Cohens office in
Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the
Cult of Risk, a book on the structural failings
of the global financial industry, the Australian
economist Satyajit Das reflected that it was
typical of that era of excessive aggression and
ethical indifference. What seems key to me in
the parallel between the shark and the Calf
is that both images disrupt those aspects of
contemplation on an artwork that might be
thought to be typical, resulting in a lack of
reflection on the absence of symbolic meaning,
social significance or moral concern.

By comparison with the radical
nullity of the shark, The Golden Calf is a
traditional work, an embellished object with
various cultural allusions, even moralor
Biblicalimplications. Even if it were the case
that the calf were not based on the Apis Bull, the
symbol of the cow or bull is itself intrinsically
connected to the brute simplicity of exchange
value: the word cattle originated in thirteenth
century Anglo-French and is related to the Old
French chatel; the medieval Latin capitale
originally referred to livestock of various kinds,
and in the late sixteenth century it came to
apply specifically to cows and bulls. Although
there is the inevitable tendency to relate
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of
Someone Living and The Golden Calf to bullish
images, it might be that the works are more akin
to that very English tradition of the equestrian
painting, which was visual proof of ownership
of that kind of sleek gambling machine.
AUCTION
As a body of new work, an intentionally
pan-mediated event and sale, Beautiful in
my Head Forever might be regarded as one
single, epic artwork: a defining statement
of Hirsts vision as an artist, in which the
relationship between art and its value
(culturally, financially, spiritually) achieved
a seamless co-dependencythus further
amplifying its stark commentary on those
fundamental concerns it addresses.8

23

This is how writer and critic Michael Bracewell

described Hirsts straight-to-auction exhibition,
an event, as I mentioned above, that took place
on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis. In its
double-speak, its evasion of the use of the word
greed and its weak attempt to present the
auction as a kind of self-critical Gesamkunstwerk,
Bracewell has failed to appreciate that what
Hirst was about to achieve was not principally
about The Art Market, but about The Museum
and how it establishesinstitutionalises
value by producing and housing the
historical. The audacity of this event went
far beyond anything Hirst had attempted
before, because it undermined those agents
in the artworldgallerists, curators, critics,
historianswhose roles are intended to
gradually create the circumstances that make
possible collecting and the collections eventual
incorporation, through the Museum, into the
broader culture. By sending the work straight
to auction, Hirst evaded the time and the
commercial and intellectual labour it takes to
enable work to accrue value. Instead of the artobject passing from the hand of the maker to a
sales-person, then under the eyes of the critic
and historian to a collector and then, as a part
of a collection, to an institution, this body of
Hirsts works went straight from his workshop
to an auction and then to an art warehouse or
bank vault. In a certain sense it would seem
there is no difference between the vault, in
which expensive, hard-to-insure contemporary
artworks are kept and a tomb in which precious
sculptures have been placed around an
important persons mummified corpse.
In both their works, value is invested and
activated in something called The Afterlife.
Sold to an unknown buyer for 10.3 million,
Hirsts The Golden Calf has not yet, as far I am
aware, been exhibited. Like so many other
works sold in the upper-reaches of the global
art market, it is a kind of cypher of capital, an
idea of the Image.

Yet this calf, as much as that sculpture
of the original, biblical incident, is not mere
graven image. In its particularity, its iconicity,
Hirsts Calf demonstrates how meaning and
historical allusion disappear in the process of
capitalisation. Not even one of the many people
who wrote on his work thought to consider the
Egyptian aspect of the icon! Even in the midst of
the auction, which attracted a huge amount of
attention from the international news media, the
blindness of contemporary arts commentators
increased. In fact it could be said that an art

auction itself is that theatre, that strange kind of

peepshow, in which capitals acceleration leads
to the disappearance of the Image itself. It is as
if Hirsts work, especially The Golden Calf,
could be said to have been made only for the
eyes of the undead, the zombies of accelerated
capital.

Understood within the broader
context of changes taking place in the global
artworld and in the strange, fast-evolving
intimacy of new technologies like Facebook
and iPhone, the example of Hirsts The Golden
Calf, its illustration of value and of the emptying
of the historical iconocity of its Egyptian
tradition should meet with recognition in the
context of the study of the post-colonial. Just as
the imperial West neutralised signs of African
civilisation by ripping the artefacts from the
original circumstances of their use and meaning,
so too contemporary capitalism wrenches the
Image from the attentive process of looking and
contemplation. One journalist, interviewing an
international banker at Hirsts Gagosian show
in Moscow was told: The oligarchs know about
assets like oil-fields and factories. They only buy
art for fun... to be famous and entertaining. Its a
toy to them.9 Enough said?

This, our idol, Hirsts The Golden Calf,
in its ambiguous gesturing and figured vacancy,
even as it awaits its return to the spotlight of
another auction from its London or Ukrainian
vault, is a vivid example of this kind of
devolution, this particularly contemporary
art.
POSTSCRIPT
This essay was presented as a paper at the
visual arts panel of the Afro-Europeans: Black
Cultures and Identities in Europe conference in
London in 2013, and so was written with a sense
of how an audience familiar with the pillaging
of Africa and Egypt might understand a
contemporary version of the icon of the Golden
Calf. Yet it had its origin in time I spent in the
city the year before when I was investigating
the relationship between British public art
institutions and the global art market.
In attempting to understand the lack of
prominence of the art of so-called peripheral
countries in the mainstream of the global art
market, especially in the auction houses, I had
started to reflect on the nature of iconocity in
contemporary art. It seems to me that today
writers on contemporary art seldom address
the iconological nature of images, their sets
of allusions and deeper histories, even while

c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 3 . 3 2 014

the art market depends heavily on powerful,

atavistic images, just as advertising does.
Hence, my interest in that unholy trinity:
Hirst, the Golden Calf and Saatchi. But this
must leave us, viewers on the periphery, if
not of the networked world at least of the
global art market, wondering what effect this
particular kind of vacuity of the image has
on us? For instance, how should we see those
icons-yet-to-be that were displayed to us in
the relatively recent Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide:
British Art Now?10 Or how reassured can we be
by the acclaim implicit in Ben Quiltys current
exhibition of paintings11 at the Saatchi Gallery
in Sloane Square, the heart of Londons luxury
shopping precinct?
Notes
1
The pre-auction exhibition was held 515 September, 2008 at
Sothebys in Old Bond Street, London, the traditional heart of
the British art-market
2
Michael Bracewell, Beautiful in my Head Forever,
Ann Gallagher (ed.), Damien Hirst, London: Tate Publishing,
2012: 180
3
The Chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority is
Sheika al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, the
thirty-one year old sister of Qatars emir. It is thought that
the organisation has an annual budget for acquisitions of
up to $US 1 billion. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/
arts/design/qatar-uses-its-riches-to-buy-art-treasures.
html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
4
Another extraordinary event at the time of Hirsts
retrospective at Tate Modern (4 April9 September, 2012)
was the British Museums Hajji: Journey to the Heart of
Islam (26 June15 April, 2012) which, like Hirsts show had,
principally, a sole affluent sponsor, the King Abdulaziz Public
Library of Riyadh, albeit supported, too, by HSBC Amanah
5
For further reading see Patrick F. Houlihans The Animal
World of the Pharaohs, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996
6
Herodotus, The Histories, John D. Marincola (ed.). London:
Penguin, 2003: 178
7
Any visitor to London at the time of Damien Hirsts Tate
Modern show, an exhibition intended to be the art show for
visitors in the city for the Olympics, would have also seen
advertised in the Tube and on other public transport posters
for Charles Saatchis new book Be the Worst You can Be:
Lifes too Long for Virtue and Patience, which had been
published in the same month that Hirsts show opened.
If I recall correctly, the image on the poster was a
photograph of a horned Saatchi
8
Bracewell, op cit: 180. This is cited in one of the most
insightful essays written about the work of Hirst. Interestingly,
it is an extended text on marketing written by three scholars
at London School of Business. Like sociologists, these authors
see how Hirsts work is about a special understanding of the
conjunction of contemporary economics and theatricalised
consumption. Jorg Reckhenrich, Jamie Anderson and Martin
Kupp, The Shark is Dead: How to Build Yourself a Market;
www.innovation.london.edu
9

20 July23 October, 2011

10

Ben Quilty, 4 July3 August 2014. This exhibition is

part of his winning the inaugural Prudential Eye Award
for Contemporary Art, an award for art from what is called
on the Saatchi Gallerys website the Greater Asia region.
Consultation of the Awards own site reveals that this larger
region is divided into twenty smaller ones; and that Quilty won
both the painting category and the overall category for 2014