A new sort of rubbish 2

Readers will be interested to know that the Hiram Butler gallery at reference 1, first noticed here at reference 2, is offering a limited edition Powerpoint from Damien Hirst, illustrated left. You can have the red spot with mount but without frame for $750 or with both for $800. Plus postage and packing. And for double your money you can have it signed on the back.

The Powerpoint has been encrypted using a bit of special software sold by Norton and will self destruct after 500 prints have been taken. The cunning software defeats attempts to cheat by downloading a digital copy or by using the MS snipping tool. So, in case you were wondering, the use of the phrase 'limited edition' is entirely kosher. Or perhaps halal.

Now we have a number of woodcuts on our walls here at Epsom, mostly the work of an uncle. For example, 'Fenland River', of which we have numbers 31 and 47 from an edition of 75, one of a small number of well-beloved works of which we have more than one copy about the place. The uncle was a part-timer as far as wood cutting was involved, so, guessing, this woodcut was the work of a month; a month up close and personal with a block of box wood (probably made of more than one piece), maybe 8 inches by 6. The drill with the revenue people was that you did not have to charge your customers VAT provided that the edition was limited to less than some magic number - a magic number which I remember as being less than 75, but not being invented until after this particular cutting - and that the block was defaced by a deep diagonal cut after that number of prints had been pulled. Thinking about it this morning, I thought that defacing one's work in this way must have caused a bit of a twinge. Perhaps in the same way that a sculptor in bronze might have had a bit of a twinge when required by his client to break the mould after he had finished a commission.

Hard to imagine Hirst having any such pangs after a few seconds with Powerpoint. Perhaps just a quiet chuckle at the gullibility of the art buying public. Perhaps he doesn't even have to bother with the Powerpoint - and he just gets his assistant to knock them out and post them to him. No great loss if he has to can half of them as not being up to his usual snuff.

PS: I did think about whether it would be right to give air time to Hirst in this way, but decided that I could mount a plausible public interest defense.

Reference 1: http://hirambutler.com/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/kejserens-nye-klder.html.