Damien Hirst guilty of plagiarism?

Meet the grandfather of Britart - Sunday Telegraph

Extract:

"When Damien Hirst and his fellow enfants terribles burst on to the art scene in the Nineties, there was no doubt that they had drawn inspiration from sources that were far from the cultural mainstream.

Just how far has now become clear. A gruesome book written as the definitive guide to the science of pathology was so heavily mined by leading artists in the movement that an octogenarian Cambridge professor can rightly be credited as the unintentional grandfather of Britart, one of their number has confessed.

Featuring graphic photographs of murder scenes, decomposed bodies, dissected organs and medical instruments, A Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology, by G Austin Gresham, was the Britart bible, according to Mat Collishaw, the young British artist who came to prominence at the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997.

Austin Gresham, now 82 and emeritus professor of morbid anatomy and histopathology at Jesus College, compiled the book for trainee pathologists. Published in 1975, it was, according to its author, "designed to fit into a jacket pocket so that it could be taken into the field".

It was in the field of art, however, that the book has had most influence. Hirst acquired a copy from a fellow student while an art student at Goldsmiths College in south-east London in the Eighties. He was arrested by its contents and he and other artists, including Collishaw and Marcus Harvey, went on to use it as the starting point for many of their most controversial pieces."

"Despite his influence, Prof -Gresham remains unimpressed by his accidental claim to fame. Voicing disapproval of Hirst's "offensive" images, he said: "I'm very sorry that the book was an inspiration to him. It is a misuse.

"I'm not pleased that he might have used the pictures to engender his works of art. I thought that sheep in a tank was disgusting. It's not right to subject people to this kind of thing.

"But the general public are idiots when it comes to modern art. You can hang up a rat by its tail and call that art and people will believe you. And these artists seem to make a fortune out of it."

David Lee, the editor of The Jack-daw, an arts monthly, said he was not surprised by Hirst's inspiration.

"Hirst appears to have no imagination of his own whatsoever," he said. "The paradox is that he's very protective about what he sees as his own inventions but has no qualms about plagiarising other people's.""


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