Davide Caniatti

When I speak of Damien Hirst to someone who does not know him, the first approximation I can formulate is “that one with the shark in formalin”. Reducing the career of one of the greatest living British artists to that is probably ungenerous, but the approximation often works. The shark immobilized inside the chemical bath has become an iconic image of contemporary art. I have always found the image in question to be extremely powerful.

In art history manuals it is often written how great artists have almost a sixth sense in interpreting and understanding the era in which they live better than all the others around them. There is a German term -Zeitgeist- which precisely means “spirit of the time” and knowing how to grasp it would be a supreme sign of the artist’s skill. If we were to find the spirit of our time, the things that best represent it, we could easily list the pandemic, the distance, the metaverse, the network, and the crisis.

This blog is about photography, but not only. Photography is a passion that often does not talk about itself, but dialogues with the subject. It is, for example, our pursuit of interesting and new subjects that pushes us to travel. After observing some images on the web, I decided to visit Damien Hirst’s <a href=“https://galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it/en/exhibition/damien-hirst/"http://google.com")" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>“Archaeology Now”exhibition at the Borghese Gallery in Rome. Needless to say, I liked it a lot, and I would like to take this opportunity to tell my two readers why.