At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is a piece by Damien Hirst entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. I call it The Shark Tank. Why? Because it’s a shark in a tank and nothing more. See, I don’t find anything worth my while in art that relies entirely on metaphor and symbolism to be interesting. That’s not to say metaphor shouldn’t be a component of art. In fact, the opposite is true; a successful piece of art functions on two levels, one of which is its subtext. The second and more significant level is the response a piece is able to engender based solely on its physical characteristics, its concept, execution, craft, originality. In other words, the ability of a piece to make someone stop and look.
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