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From The Desk Of Barry Adamson: Damien Hirst’s “For The Love Of God”

Barry Adamson is in a weird position. After winning acclaim for the noir-cinematic atmospheres of solo projects such as Moss Side Story and the mash-up of Back To The Cat, writing songs for directors such as Danny Boyle, Oliver Stone and David Lynch, and composing film scores for Delusion and Out Of Depth, the 53-year-old writer/multi-instrumentalist found himself directing, writing and acting in his own movie with 2011’s The Therapist. “I’m a marketing man’s nightmare,” he jokes. To make things more intense, Adamson—post-punk’s most legendary bassist, with roles in Magazine and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds—returned to the scene of the live-music crime by playing gigs with Howard Devoto’s re-united Magazine after decades of being a lone wolf. What was he thinking? And how did all of that recent interaction inspire his newest project, the aggressive Destination? Read our new Q&A with him below. Adamson will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.

Adamson: For The Love Of God is a sculpture by artist Damien Hirst produced in 2007. It consists of a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead. Costing £14 million to produce, the work went on display at the White Cube gallery in London in an exhibition Beyond Belief with an asking price of £50 million. This would have been the highest price ever paid for a single work by a living artist.

The Daily Telegraph wrote, “If anyone but Hirst had made this curious object, we would be struck by its vulgarity. It looks like the kind of thing Osprey or Harrods might sell to credulous visitors from the oil states with unlimited amounts of money to spend, little taste, and no knowledge of art. I can imagine it gracing the drawing room of some African dictator or Colombian drug baron. But not just anyone made it—Hirst did. Knowing this, we look at it in a different way and realise that in the most brutal, direct way possible, For The Love Of God questions something about the morality of art and money.” I think it’s a fantastic piece for all the right and wrong reasons. Hirst pitches it just right for me and gets everybody running around in circles, questioning what he’s doing exactly. There is no other piece he could have made at the time or worked it the way he did which is just genius.

Video after the jump.