Damien Hirst - Comments and Message Board

THE ASTRONOMICAL NEW HISTORY OF ARTFollowing Damien Hirst’s £50 million “For the love of God”, I have decided to put my painting “The eternal and infinite universe (94)” on the market for £50 million and one pence. This work, painted in 1994, November, carried a brief explanation of the universe as eternal and infinite, reasoning that the visible universe should be accelerating apart (in a way that also explained the ‘clumping of matter’ phenomenon). It also provided an explanation for Olbers paradox, in an infinite universe, in terms of basic physics. The painting was publicly exhibited first in Jan 1995 with a price of £7 million.Gathering observations of supernovae about two-to-three years later showed the universe was accelerating apart (against all the expectations of astrophysicists) affirming the theory in the painting.Naturally, if the universe is infinite and eternal (something we can never know for sure) then everything is ultimately unfathomable. Maybe that is why the universe becomes more understandable ultimately to an artist than to scientists.The new price reflects the painting’s (not yet widely known) unique achievement in the history of art and the history of understanding the universe: two histories that should converge, as they do in this work.Mark Bridger